61-Year-Old Minnesota Man Arrested, Unharmed
PTE-2151 Orange County Coin 2012 v2
A Minnesota man attacked a Menards staffer who had asked him to wear a mask. The assault was phoned in while the man left the store and got into his vehicle. He was later spotted by Hutchinson Police officers. Officers approached the man but he refused to leave his vehicle and, when confronted, pinned an officer and drove off with the officer holding onto the truck. While holding on, the 61-year-old man attacked the officer with a hammer. The officer is recovering in the hospital. The 61-year-old man has since been arrested. The McLeod County Sheriff’s office is investigating.
Footage of the incident is available here.
This happened yesterday in Minnesota, the suspect was a 61-year-old white man fleeing police. He wasn’t shot or tased. pic.twitter.com/FEq39kssC9
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) April 15, 2021
The 61-year-old man was unharmed.
The police statement is below.
UPDATE: The 61-year-old man has been identified as Luke Alvin Oeltjenbruns.
Well, that cop was no angel. What was he even doing on the truck in the first place?Report
I decided to look at how Hutchinson voted.
Looks like they were 58.4% Trump in 2016 and 59.1% Trump in 2020.
Are the districts that vote for Trump more likely to have well-trained police that do their jobs the way that we would expect them to?Report
That is certainly one conclusion you could draw here.Report
I imagine that there is a relationship between government and law enforcement.Report
Again, that is certainly one conclusion you could draw here.
There are, for the record, others you might consider.Report
It would be pretty to think so, right?Report
It’d be exonerative if it wasn’t.Report
Oeltjenbruns has the least surprising Facebook profile imaginable.Report
You wouldn’t believe how often I’ve seen the argument that we should look at the social media profiles of people who have had interactions with the police.Report
Could you explicitly spell out what you’re trying to insinuate here?Report
You’re smart enough to figure it out.Report
I find it slightly more admirable to make claims without foundation than to coyly nearly make claims without foundation.Report
Took me about two minutes.Report
Keep working at it and you’ll get it figured out.Report
Here’s another.
And another.
And another.
In 2019, according to the FBI, police officers made over 1.8 million arrests of black people. Of those, 129,000 were for violent crimes, and over 4,000 were for homicides. I believe that the actual numbers are higher, because not all jurisdictions participate in UCR reporting. According to the Washington Post, 252 black people were fatally shot by police that year. Black suspects, even those who have committed violent felonies up to and including homicide, are taken alive in the vast majority of cases.
In fact, as I’ve pointed out before, the rate of fatal police shootings per 100,000 arrests is fairly similar across races. The numbers above suggest 13.9 fatal shootings of black suspects per 100k arrests, versus 12.4 per 100k for non-Hispanic whites, and 12.8 per 100k for Hispanics. Using violent crimes as a denominator, we get 19.5 per 10k for blacks, 35.3 per 10k for non-Hispanic whites, and 18.6 per 10k for Hispanics. It’s hard to say what the correct denominator is. Presumably arrests of violent criminals are significantly more likely to result in justifiable homicides, but I’m not sure what percentage of fatal shootings of suspects originate with attempts to arrest them for violent crimes.
This idea that police are just looking for excuses to kill black people but will go to any lengths to avoid killing a white person is not even approximately consistent with the big picture data. If you cherry-pick anecdotal evidence that supports this idea, you can make it appear to be true, but you can also cherry-pick data that shows the exact opposite. It’s a big country, and you can tell just about any story you want if you only look at the data that fits that story.
You should aspire to tell only stories that describe all the data, not stories that describe a tiny and carefully curated subset of the data.
Specifically on the topic of suspects dragging police in cars, I speculate that officers being dragged find it difficult to shoot the driver due to being dragged and to using both hands to hold on, and may also be worried that shooting the driver will cause him to lose control, resulting in the officer getting Anwared. If the officer is alone, the suspect will likely get away. Once he’s no longer dragging an officer, he’s less of an immediate threat, and can be arrested safely.Report
Kinda weird that you’re doing all of this focusing on arrests for violent crimes given the specifics.
As for the idea that police “are just looking for excuses” you can start by looking into data about what police find when they pull people over.Report
This is where I would normally cite all the DOJ investigations of local PDs which conclude that systemic racism is the only explanation to account for the data sets reviewed. I won’t cite them now, because I’m lazy and depressed and have cited them repeatedly over the years to no effect whatsoever.Report
It’s worth noting the endless professionalism, patience, and politeness cops hand out to middle-class (and better) white citizens is their primary asset in covering over their actions with…everyone else.
After all, who are you going to believe? A lifetime of polite interactions with the police? Or some dead black man? Who was once arrested for having weed and made the mistake of screwing up Officer Simon Says?
I’ve been driving 30 years now. A lifetime of cops being polite to me.
Of course, in a weird way, I’ve been lucky — I’ve seen the mask slip twice. Once when I happened to witness a cop cause a car accident through reckless driving, and watch what seemed to be the entirety of my city’s police force show up and figure out how to make the other driver’s fault.
And once when taking my father to the hospital, as he was bleeding heavily (he’s on blood thinners) from a bad cut. The cop pulled me over, saw a man freely spurting blood (despite heavy pressure, it was soaking through a towel) and took his sweet time deciding that maybe it’d be okay to give me the ticket a half mile down the road, in the hospital parking lot, after I got my dad into the ER.
You could clearly see him enjoying making my father wait.
I later learned that particular cop was nicknamed “Officer Friendly” by the local high school staff, as he was routinely assigned there and was a notorious a**hole. Who the local PD thought would absolutely be the best person to interface with high school kids.Report
That’s a good point, and it reminds me of the first time my mother was pulled over by the cops, when she was into her late forties, and the result didn’t go her way. She’d been happy hour drinking and the cop who pulled her over made her do a roadside. Which she failed. She ended up in the clink for the night. Her takeaway was that she *couldn’t believe* how heavy handed cops can be, how humiliating the experience is, and how wrong they were to do that to an honest, tax-paying white woman when there’s all this *crime* going on. She was bitter about it for years. Her privilege failed her and she didn’t know how to process it.Report
And think about it, all the things cops let slide with “people like me”. I don’t get many tickets, but I’ve often been let off with a warning — or a lesser ticket than I could have been given.
I’ve never had my car searched, never been given a roadside test, never had a cop act like he thought I was a threat.
So if you have a lifetime of that, and then you see cops go off on some guy — kneeling on his neck, or tasing him for what appears to be no reason, or claims they just rolled up shooting, or got called in and arrested the black guy that called them in, not the white guy they were called on (true story), or just stories like “I’m a federal court judge and I get pulled over all the time for BS reasons, and it only happens to the black judges”….
Well, your instinct is going to be “What are they doing WRONG? What are they doing to MAKE COPS ACT THAT WAY?”.
And so they’re primed for “Oh the guy once dealt weed. The guy had a warrant for not showing up in traffic court”. They look for reasons to justify the police misconduct, because their entire lives have been seeing police act differently. So the obvious conclusion is to blame the guy the police are beating on, because it squares with their personal experience of polite cops who didn’t seem like racists or jerks or abusive at all!
(Fun story: Once, not long after I’d gotten married, I’d dumbly stopped taking my anti-seizure meds a few years before and had a seizure. My wife called the EMTs, and a police officer showed up around the same time. My wife had an open warrant for failure to appear over a ticket she’d forgotten about.
She wasn’t arrested. The cop just told her to take care of it by Friday. He didn’t enforce the warrant. He flat out warned her about it. She paid it that afternoon.
She was not, I note, shot over it while I was postictal. )Report
Yeah, when I think of all the bad behavior I’ve gotten away with (literally) it makes me appreciate the distinctions. I’ve (quite literally) talked back to and corrected cops while I was drunk and on the way to the liquor store and … gotten away. I’ve told cops that their radar guns are wrong and … gotten away. My wife (white woman :), when told by the cops to put her hands on the car so she could be frisked, (literally) told them to fuck off and walked away … and got away. The other two white people with her when this happened also got away post frisking, but the black guy with them spent the night in jail.
My learned experience is that I – as a white person who has internalized his real privilege – can get away with stuff that black people cannot. Other white people learn different lessons.Report
If you don’t have black friends — or simply don’t get a ride with them often — it’s just not something you see.
It all goes back to the very, very old unspoken duties of police. To make sure the wrong sort know their place. It’s supposed to be out of sight, out of mind — and the way cops treat the right sort covers up any incidents that see the light of day.
But this is getting untenable when we all carry Big Brother in our pocket.
There is no out of sight, out of mind. People are noticing, and 200 years of policing culture is hard to change. Especially when, charitably, at least 15% of the population sees the boot being put in and cheers it on.Report
Those numbers avoid the particulars.
We are often told that the only way cops can respond to a Black mean reaching for the wallet they told him to take out is with fear-filled and deadly violence. Or that cops had no choice but to shoot and kill someone who was standing 30 feet away with a knife because he maybe coulda posed a threat.
But then we see this. Which shows that maybe other responses are possible.
So if THIS is considered good police work than shouldn’t the opposite of this be considered bad police work?Report
Did the 61 y/o male have any warrants? Had he been arrested before? Had the 61 y/o man been arrested for unlawfully carrying a gun?
Why do so many progressives want to inply that police should not bother to stop or arrest blacks?Report
Because regardless of what many pro-police folks thing, evading arrest isn’t a capital offense, and in many cases, it ends up being so.Report
We keep having “is” and “ought” problems, for some reason.Report
Progressives neither imply nor state that.
We simply call out the fact that Black Americans stopped for minor things like hanging air fresheners end up dead but whites pursued for things like this – or massacring church goers – end up alive. And we conclude based on volumes of data across a great many sources and studies and academic disciplines that the police’s training to view all Black Americans, and particularly all Black men, as criminals and thus a threat is the major driving factor in that out come.Report