Don Samuels

That was so painful — just painful to watch and to see a Black man, of dark complexion, under the knee of a dispassionate White male, it conjured up all kinds of slavery imagery.

It was like a World Trade Center moment for us, our jaws fell to the floor. Literally, we were aghast. We looked at each other and said,' Oh, my God. It's going to be Crime City in Minneapolis City.'.

We don't have to choose safety or police -- we can have both/and, let's get rid of the bad police, let's fix the fixable police.

When the announcement was made to defund the police … that just opened the doors to a level of mayhem where taboos were erased, standards were no longer acknowledged because only the cops could be wrong – a citizen couldn’t be wrong, and so, the naivete of the leadership to not understand how the lawless community would exploit their announcement was maddening.

Our mantra is not ‘either/or,’ but ‘both/and, most of the protesters are young. They’re college students. They’re younger than college students. And they have a pretty limited framework for understanding how complex issues are.

If those people who are saying, ‘get rid of the police,’ would say, ‘you know what, we’re going to come in and we’re going to become a part of this community. We’re going to give our hard-earned income to shop in this community. We’re going to mentor kids in this community,’ now you’re talking, but you can’t just say, let’s get rid of the police and then live these other social deficiencies or problems in place.