In which we are reliably informed that due process is not an aspect of good leadership:
The Brooklyn Center City Manager, Curt Boganey, has been fired after he publicly disagreed with Mayor Mike Elliott’s assertion that the police officer who fatally shot a black man in the Minneapolis suburb should immediately be fired.
As City Manager, Boganey controlled the police department.
Speaking earlier to reporters, he said the officer who shot 20-year-old Daunte Wright would get ‘due process’ after the shooting.
‘All employees working for the city of Brooklyn Center are entitled to due process with respect to discipline,’ he said.
But the mayor, unhappy at the public disagreement quickly took the police department under his control and the Brooklyn Center City Council voted to fire Boganey, a longtime city employee, during an emergency meeting.
‘Effective immediately our city manager has been relieved of his duties, and the deputy city manager will be assuming his duties moving forward,’ Elliott wrote on Twitter. ‘I will continue to work my hardest to ensure good leadership at all levels of our city government.’
For the vast majority of you who are not familiar with the Twin Cities, Brooklyn Center is an inner ring suburb of Minneapolis that has always had a noticeable African population, although it is still majority white. I’m very familiar with it because Brooklyn Center was in the Tri-Metro Conference with my high school back then, so I ran track against their sprinters on a regular basis.
If I recall correctly, when I won the 100-meter at the conference championship my senior year, the second-, third-, and fourth-place finishers were all from Brooklyn Center. Unsurprisingly, they took the 4×100 relay that year. I still remember my main rival from BC, a short, powerful guy named Simmy, who had a rocket start. It was intimidating, but I soon learned that as long as I wasn’t more than two steps behind once I was fully up, I’d catch him at the 50-meter mark.
Fortunately, thanks to three decades of anti-racist indoctrination since then, the Africans there no longer see color. It’s like seeing Martin Luther King’s dream come true!