Rashad Anthony Turner, in a “Black Lives Matter St. Paul” T-shirt, stood before hundreds gathered and used a bullhorn to tell them, “We all know that the police are paid to lie,” urging that officers wear body cameras.
Turner was leading protesters that day to the gates of the Minnesota State Fair. He has repeated his call for justice against police misconduct with marches that have shut down light-rail trains and streets in St. Paul.
Yet Turner was almost one of the men in blue he now protests. His father was murdered in St. Paul when he was about 1-1/2 years old, and he says he grew up “wanting to catch bad guys” as a result. He trained to become a police officer but changed course and went into the education field.
He has had a complicated relationship with law enforcement — as an insider who interned with St. Paul police, the very department he now speaks critically of, and on the other side when he has pleaded guilty to minor infractions in years past.
“I’m a normal person — I have struggled, will continue to struggle just like every other normal person,” Turner said. “People need to understand I’m fighting for justice, I’m trying to help my community. … I’m on that ground level with the people.”
But Turner, the most visible leader of Black Lives Matter St. Paul, which is not a nationally recognized chapter, has drawn criticism for protests he has organized in the past month. He has been the subject of intense ire in the last week for the group’s announced plans to “disrupt” Sunday’s Twin Cities Marathon, and some question whether the group’s tactics separate people further rather than spur action. Turner met with the city’s mayor Thursday and said afterward that protesters would not interfere with runners.
People who know Turner describe him as a leader who is fearless in standing up for what he believes. He’s 30 years old, lives in St. Paul, is a father to a 7-year-old girl and is working on his master’s degree in educational leadership.
Dave Titus, president of the union representing rank-and-file St. Paul police officers, has not met Turner but has sparred publicly with him over a chant of some protesters — “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon — during the August march. Titus has said that message promotes death to officers, something Turner disputes.
“It seems like he’s more interested in self-promotion and hate mongering than he is in engaging in anything constructive,” Titus said of Turner this week.
From Tyrone Terrill’s perspective as chairman of the African-American Leadership Council, protesting will never be popular.
“I think any time that you’re causing people to be engaged and have a conversation about racism, injustice, it’s a good thing,” he said.
GRANDMOTHER ‘REALLY SAVED MY LIFE’
Turner has recounted his life story as he worked with students through the years, hoping to connect with them.
His mother was 16 when she gave birth to him in February 1985. In September 1986, a man fatally shot Turner’s father during an argument. Turner’s brother was 1 month old, and their mother struggled to care for her sons in the traumatic time that followed, said Turner and his maternal grandmother, Viola Turner.
When Rashad was 2 or 3 years old, he called his grandmother and asked, “Should I call child protection or the police?” because his mother was not there, though the children weren’t alone, Viola Turner said. She stepped in and ended up raising her two grandsons.
Viola Turner strived to get the boys involved in sports, found them mentors and gave them an early look at activism. She was a state worker who took Rashad to union and political rallies, and she sought the DFL endorsement for St. Paul City Council in 1999.
“She really saved my life,” Rashad Turner said. Still, he grew up in his grandmother’s Frogtown home feeling abandoned by his parents.
“I had a lot of anger toward my dad, a lot of anger toward my mom up until a couple of years ago, when I really started to open my eyes and wake up to how economic injustices lead to social injustices,” which he believed affected his parents’ lives, Turner said.
Turner has taken that message of “economic injustices” to BLM St. Paul, including the State Fair protest. He said minorities were not adequately represented among the Fair’s vendors. The Fair responded that would-be vendors don’t disclose their race when applying and that spots are competitive but open to anyone.
“I look at the big picture,” Turner said of BLM St. Paul’s mission. “If your only focus is on these street cops who are beating people and who are killing people, then you’re missing everything that’s leading up to that. If we aren’t talking about economics, unemployment rates, then what are you really talking about?”
Gov. Mark Dayton, in speaking about the marathon protest this week, suggested BLM activists would be more effective if they proposed specific, constructive changes. But Turner said it should not fall to his group to create a list of demands.
“I don’t feel like it’s our responsibility to focus on something that we didn’t create, as far as policy and legislation,” Turner said. “These people know what the problems are, they know what policies are creating these disparities, these are elected officials.”
The Minneapolis chapter of Black Lives Matter has pointed out that the St. Paul organization is “an independent group of racial justice activists,” while they are one of 26 nationally recognized chapters. Turner said his group has started the process to become an official chapter.
TURNED FROM LAW ENFORCEMENT TO EDUCATION
BLM St. Paul said they would protest at the marathon to support a 15-year-old boy and his mother arrested during a church picnic in Frogtown. Some have expressed concern about the force used to arrest the teen, who the officer said was resisting arrest. The marathon protest also is intended to highlight other cases, including last week’s fatal police shooting of Philip Quinn, 30, who was reported to be suicidal; St. Paul police have not said what led the officer to shoot.
Turner said his own training to become a police officer gave him insight into what happens in street encounters between officers and civilians. During his last semester at Highland Park Senior High School in 2003, Turner said he interned at the St. Paul Police Department and mostly did ride-alongs with officers.
He went on to graduate from Hamline University with a bachelor’s in criminal justice and earned his law enforcement certificate through Minneapolis Community and Technical College to become a licensed peace officer. His first day of class for the certificate in 2009, though, pushed him away from becoming a police officer, Turner said.
Students learned when officers could legally shoot someone and “the importance of articulating the fear or the threats” in their reports, Turner said.
“They were not, in my opinion, explaining it just verbatim off the statute, but explaining it in a way of, ‘Here’s what you need to say.’ ” Turner said he regarded that direction as “teaching us basically how to get away with murder.”
Mylan Masson, the director of MCTC’s law enforcement program at the time and now in the same position at Hennepin Technical College, remembers Turner as a student who was “very conscientious and did an excellent job” but does not recall hearing concerns from him about how the class was taught.
When Masson teaches the class, she said she tells law enforcement students, “Nobody ever wants to shoot anybody ever. … When we do have to do it, we’re fighting with ourselves all the time. We have to know the Constitution, we have to know laws,” along with policies and procedures.
Turner completed the training but had become interested in another field as a way to help others: education.
He worked as a cultural liaison for the White Bear Lake Area Schools for five years and then began working for Century College in White Bear Lake in 2013. He was coordinator of its Scholars Program, which provides scholarships and academic support for students of color and for those with financial need, until this summer. Now, Turner is focusing on earning his master’s degree online through St. Mary’s University of Minnesota and is a Green Party-endorsed write-in candidate for the St. Paul School Board.
POLICE RUN-INS
As Turner has been in the public eye for BLM St. Paul, he said he has heard from people supporting them but has also received death threats and racial slurs through email and social media. When detractors brought up Turner’s criminal record and posted his mug shot, he briefly made it his Facebook profile picture.
Turner said he was trying to make a point, “You’re not going to distract me, you’re not going to make me feel like I need to be perfect in order to fight against imperfections of our system.”
Court records include convictions for petty misdemeanor disorderly conduct at age 20 and possession of a BB gun in a public place when he was 19.
In the 2004 misdemeanor BB gun case, Turner said he had used it to shoot rabbits or squirrels at the Highland Park golf course with his friends and had forgotten the weapon was in the car. Police also found mace in the car’s center console and it was labeled as “police unit,” a police report said.
An investigator wrote she had received information that during Turner’s internship at the police department a year earlier “several officers reported a variety of items missing,” including chemical irritant (commonly known as Mace), a bullet-resistant vest and binoculars.
Turner told the investigator extra canisters of the chemical spray had been lying around at the police department and a staff member had given it to him, the report said. Turner said he did not take anything else, but an officer had lent him his extra vest during a ride-along, and he had not seen the officer again to return it. The investigator retrieved the vest from his house.
Turner said recently he regards it as a misunderstanding and it does not influence his criticism for the department now.
INSPIRED BY SELMA MARCH
Turner said he was spurred to start BLM St. Paul after traveling to Selma, Ala., in March to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. He joined thousands in marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where Alabama state troopers had attacked peaceful civil rights demonstrators in 1965.
“I had prayed on it before, ‘If God wants me to do this work, just let me know. Give me a sign, give me a dream or whatever it might be,’ ” Turner said.
The trip occurred because of a chance meeting with an old friend’s father, and Turner said he regarded that and the inspirational trip as the signs he had been waiting for.
“I know I have this calling from God and I think that doing the work of social justice has really allowed me to accept that,” Turner said.
Mara H. Gottfried can be reached at 651-228-5262. Follow her at twitter.com/MaraGottfried.
