
Familyâs attorney: âThis is about raceâ
Laneal Frazier, the recent victim of a police chase, was laid to rest early this week in a ceremony in which his family looked back fondly on their memories of him. It also had a tone of defiance.
“An innocent man minding his business, traveling in his neighborhood home to see his family, gets killed because you violated a policy,” said Ben Crump, whose firm is representing Frazierâs family. “We have to say no more innocent Black people being killed at the hands of the police for violating their policies.”
Vigils have been held honoring Frazierâs memory and calling for justice, and last week a press conference was called by family members and activists. âThis is about race,â said attorney Jeff Storms at the conference.
Frazier was killed in the early morning hours of July 6 when Minneapolis Police Officer Brian Cunningham broadsided him while ignoring a traffic light and speeding through an intersection while giving chase to a robbery suspect. No charges have been filed against the officer. Participants called on the Hennepin County Attorneyâs Office to file charges against the officer involved.
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âWe didnât have an opportunity to view the body,â complained Orlando Frazier, brother of Laneal Frazier. âHow can this keep going on like this? My family is hurting. My brother was a happy person, and he didnât deserve what he got.â
âI started looking at facts,â said Storms, âand USA Today did a study five years ago that showed that Black Americans are more likely to be killed by police chases even as innocent bystanders and are three times more likely to be killed than other Americans. So when someone says this is not about race, that is ignoring the various systematic race issues that are at play here, and how law enforcement polices Black communities, and the aggression with which law enforcement, in particular, polices our Black brothers and sisters.
âAccountability does not have to stop with civil accountability. When a citizen drives recklessly and kills somebody, they face criminal charges. And thatâs exactly what needs to be pursued and applied here.â
Storms addressed those who said this case was a hard case to win. âThe Black community has had to fight every step of the way to get anything resembling equality in this country. Some say these cases are hard. Cases are hard when the defendant, the offending party, doesnât want to be held accountable.
âThe City of Minneapolis has got to ask itself what kind of precedent are we going to set now. We have seen the precedent previously set in 2010 [when] a man named David Smith died almost exactly the way George Floyd was killed.â
Storms pointed out that some people have been saying, âWe have a crime problem. We have to fight crime.â He asked aloud if they are they saying, âYour innocent members of the Black community have to die to in order for us fight crime. Itâs not enough that members of the community die from pre-textual stops like Daunte Wright, but they are now telling us that in order to properly police the city of Minneapolis, innocent members of the community have to die too. That cannot be the answer to this problem.â
âThose who are in positions of power refuse to hold these police accountable,â said Nekima Levy-Armstrong.
Minneapolis NAACP president Angela Rose Myers pointed out that the policy of the Minneapolis Police Department is supposed to take into account the sanctity of life. âIt doesnât matter if words change if the policy and peopleâs practice is not actually changed. The essence of sanctity of life does not mean applying it when I feel like the life matters. No life matters in every single incidence in every single case with every single body.â

Mel Reeves was the community editor at the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder until he passed away on January 6, 2022. He had a long and storied history working at the MSR.
Find more about Reeveâs life and legacy here: spokesman-recorder.com/category/remembering-mel-reeves.