“Pointergate” erupted when Minneapolis Minnesota’s white female mayor, Besty Hodges, posed for a picture pointing at an African American man, and police and local news thought it was a “gang sign.” The story quickly went viral, and the news station and police were widely mocked.
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And the police who tipped off the news station? Turns out Mayor Hodges had called for higher police accountability, and highlighted problems in their local police department. This led Jon Stewart to speculate that the police-fed “story” was a very particular kind of sign from law enforcement to Hodges–one that involves a middle finger.
Hodges has now released a response in which she goes through the various possible motives behind generating the story: “First, maybe the head of the police union would like me to stop pointing altogether for the safety of the community. If that were truly his concern, that my pointing constitutes gang activity, then his outrage would have been sparked long, long ago. Because as the internet has documented in great detail, I point. I point a lot. Lots of people point. The President. Bill Clinton. Stephen Colbert. Babies. It is the earliest form of human communication.* I’m not going to stop pointing.”
Or second, “maybe the head of the police union wants me to refrain from being in the presence of people whose criminal history I don’t know.” The man with whom Hodges had posed was a former convict, but, Hodges writes, “In other words, maybe the head of the police union doesn’t want me interacting with the public.”
“The third option may be that the head of the police union doesn’t want me standing next to young African American men,” Hodges continues, mocking the idea that she should use “stereotypes to assess with whom I should or should not meet or stand or talk.”
And finally, the option she concludes makes the most sense: “It could be that the head of the police union wants me to stop working to raise the standards of police culture and accountability. It could be that he objects to the community policing and relationship-building measures that I am acting on, and attempted to use this non-story to discredit this work.”
Hodges ends her note with her committment to strengthening the police force’s relationship with the community, whatever the consequences for her public image might be.
Read her full response here.