Mark Rooley

— Good morning, everyone.

I'm Mark Rooley, police chief of the city of Brooklyn Park.

— We started hearing from our police officers the same complaints as they fell victim to this while off duty.

Every one of these individuals is a person of color who has had this happen to them.

Good morning, everyone.

I'm Mark Rooley, police chief of the city of Brooklyn Park.

Behind me is a bunch of amazing police chiefs that are here in support of a very short but very important message that we want to share with you.

What you won't hear from any of us today is rhetoric of abolish ICE or that there shouldn't be immigration enforcement.

The truth is immigration enforcement is necessary for our national security and for local security, but how it's done is extremely important.

In fact, we have a long history of working exceptionally well with our federal partners, including ICE agents, and we have seen the best of them perform their job extremely well in the past.

With that said, recently, as the last two weeks, we as law enforcement community have been receiving endless complaints about civil rights violations in our streets from US citizens.

What we're hearing is they're being stopped in traffic stops or on the street with no cause and being forced to demand paperwork to determine if they are here legally.

As this went on over the past two weeks, we started hearing from our police officers the same complaints as they fell victim to this while off duty.

Every one of these individuals is a person of color who has had this happen to them.

In Brooklyn Park, one particular officer that shared her story with me was stopped as she passed ice going down the roadway.

When they boxed her in, they demanded her paperwork, of which she's a US citizen and clearly would not have any paperwork.

When she became concerned about the rhetoric and the way she was being treated, she pulled out her phone.

In an attempt to record the incident, the phone was knocked out of her hands, prevented her from recording it.

The officer had their guns drawn during this interaction.

And after the officer became so concerned, they were forced to identify themselves as a Brooklyn Park police officer in hopes of slowing the incident and deescalating the incident down.