Since 2004, Target has partnered with Minneapolis police to fund a sophisticated network of technological and human vigilante surveillance in a designated region of downtown Minneapolis’ central commercial and cultural district. While warmly dubbed the “SafeZone,” any notions of safety afforded to community members dissipate upon a closer examination of the racist trail of carceral violence left behind by this public-private alliance.

“The word that people used to describe the downtown area was ‘icky,’” said then-Deputy Chief of Police Rob Allen to a room full of police officers, business leaders, and Target executives in 2009. The speech, transcribed verbatim in a 2010 Target-sponsored report extolling the virtues of the program, practically drips with racial dog-whistles as Allen describes how the SafeZone alliance came about. “So we asked exactly what they meant by this ‘ick factor,’ and they told us that when they came downtown, they were bothered by lifestyle offenders—people who were panhandling, loitering, swearing, urinating in public, and so on.”

To subdue these “lifestyle offenders” and reduce this “ick factor,” Target began by donating $300,000 to the MPD in 2004 for the installation of 30 surveillance cameras covering dozens of blocks and the creation of a radio system connecting police with business owners, private security guards, and social workers. Around the same time, Target also began funding a full-time prosecutor and paralegal in the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office dedicated to pursuing “repeat offenders”.

The confluence between public and private interests created a well-oiled ecosystem of state violence: police would monitor “icky” community members by surveilling Target-donated cameras and coordinating  with local business owners through Target-donated radios in a region that, uncoincidentally, encompassed both Target’s international corporate headquarters and Target’s flagship Nicollet Mall store.

All the while, a Target-funded prosecutor would use the footage and testimonies gathered to pursue charges against the community member. Through plea deals or convictions, the court would order a geographic restriction, banning the individual from re-entering the Target-funded SafeZone and completing the loop of corporate capture.

The confluence between public and private interests created a well-oiled ecosystem of state violence . . .

The collaboration was scarily effective: after Target began funding the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, annual convictions for these “repeat offenders” that Target wanted to pursue skyrocketed from 3 to 90. Then-County Attorney Amy Klobuchar proudly told the Washington Post in 2006 that “there were huge strings attached when we received the funding [from Target] for our new staff, and we were expected to routinely communicate how the money was used and what kind of results we’d gained.”

By 2014, the collaboration between public and private spheres had ossified into a non-profit called the Downtown Improvement District, and the Downtown Improvement District had spawned a new surveillance technique called the Downtown 100 (DT100). Through the DT100, a list of Downtown Minneapolis’ “top 100 offenders” would be compiled and shared with local police, business leaders, and staff members of the social services non-profit YouthLink. The aim? In the words of Deputy Chief of Police Rob Allen, “So the lifestyle offenders know they have to go someplace else.”

Allen’s comment is not hyperbolic: with the use of geographic restriction orders obtained as part of plea agreements, these “lifestyle offenders” did have to go someplace else: they were legally prohibited from entering the SafeZone.

And behind the neutral dog-whistles, race played a key role. Marjaan Sirdar, a former social worker with YouthLink and current freelance journalist and podcast host who has tried for the last decade to uncover Target Corporation’s startlingly deep ties with city police and prosecutors, recalls that over 90% of the people geo-restricted from the SafeZone were Black.

A photocopy of a geographic restriction order.

“Working at YouthLink was pretty life-changing,” said Sirdar over a static-y phone conversation. After starting a group for Black male youth within the center, Sirdar had immediately begun hearing stories of routine police harassment and brutality, ostensibly concentrated within the region encompassing the SafeZone.

And Sirdar quickly learned that for those—primarily Black, largely unhoused—individuals on the DT100, the mere act of moving through their own city required navigating a minefield of state violence.

“They used to have two police officers assigned to this program,” said Sirdar. “Even if you were on a bus, the police could pull you off [if you were geo-restricted] and arrest you on site.”

As much happened to Norman Irving, who, after losing both his parents and becoming homeless at 16, accrued a series of criminal convictions for “livability offenses”—riding a bike on the sidewalk, sleeping in a car, jaywalking, trespassing, possessing drug paraphernalia—all within 30 months. During a DT100 meeting, a YouthLink case manager gleefully reported to attendees that Irving had finally been accepted for public housing. That same night, a police officer in attendance arrested Irving. He lost his housing and landed in jail instead.

Upon being released, Irving found a job in Minneapolis as a dishwasher. Evading the cops became part and parcel of his daily commute, until one day, transit police stopped him, shouting, “What the [expletive] you doing downtown with your little Black ass?”

Today, Irving avoids going downtown.

“It’s almost like being an invisible man in a Ku Klux Klan meeting,” said William Menday, a then-social worker reflecting on his visit to a DT100 meeting, in an interview to Unicorn Riot. He sat around a table with police, business leaders, and social workers while mug shots flashed across the wall. “Most of the youth they were discussing, I personally knew. I was homeless with them as well.”

“I always thought there was an aura of prejudice around the Target store,” said Menday to Bloomberg. “Now I know why.”

To Menday, years of disparate instances of violence suddenly seemed to make sense: the concentration of police outside the Target on Nicollet Mall, the functional barring of certain people from entering downtown, the startlingly close relationship social workers seemed to have with local police. “I always thought there was an aura of prejudice around the Target store,” said Menday to Bloomberg. “Now I know why.”

16 years later, as the uprisings crescendoed through city streets and store windows, Target released an official statement. “We are a community in pain,” began the CEO-signed corporate press release. The irony need not be belabored. Target knew better than anyone that a community in pain, they were.

The Dakota Access Pipeline, an environmental beast that slices across the Midwest, taught the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission a few lessons as they sat around a boardroom table and deliberated Enbridge’s permit for pipeline construction in 2018. Namely, that pipelines were not popular, that people would protest them, and that policing those people would be costly—in the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), to the tune of millions of dollars.

To fund this anticipated state violence, Enbridge’s construction permits contained a wholly unprecedented condition: Enbridge needed to fund local police responses to protests.

Per the arrangement, the money would not flow directly from corporate coffers to police pockets. Rather, MPUC permits required the creation of an escrow account that would be managed by an MPUC appointee who would disburse funds as-needed to police. Ultimately, they chose a law enforcement veteran of 30 years named Richard Hart to serve as the arbiter between public and private spheres.

“It’s a giant slush fund for overtime,” said the Center for Protest Law and Litigation’s Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, an attorney who represents people facing charges for protesting the pipeline. By July of 2021, Enbridge had reimbursed police for over $1 million in expenses that ranged from ballistic missile helmets to Detective Andrew Demeyer’s buffalo chips and fiesta salad dinner.  “Individual officers are making a lot of money off of the privatization of American law enforcement,” said Verheyden-Hilliard in a later interview.

Aitkin County Sheriff Dan Guida justified the dystopian arrangement by reasoning that a private fund was preferable to “taxpayers footing the bill.” Nowhere did he address concerns that untethering ostensibly public services from public sources of funding would insulate abuses from the public scrutiny that generally follows tax-funded endeavors, nor that such an arrangement could encourage excessive policing to the extent that it serves capital.

In an interview to The Intercept, Verheyden-Hilliard voiced these concerns, saying that the arrangement was “essentially privatizing the public police forces to work in service to the pecuniary interests of the private corporation. More specifically,” she continued “it means that the corporation gets to use the public police forces to crack down on their political opponents.”

And crack down, they did. Demonstrators reported having been shot with rubber bullets, targeted with crowd-dispersing sonic devices, teargassed, and arrested en masse while protesting this Canadian corporate project aimed at transporting 760,000 barrels of tar sands oil each day.

Since construction began, police have arrested nearly 900 of these protestors. Local prosecutors have indicated similar indiscretion, slapping over 100 protestors with trumped-up felony charges, including “felony theft” for those who had chained themselves to construction machinery.

These unprecedented contortions of law implicate Enbridge: The Center for Protest Law and Litigation obtained emails between Hubbard County’s Lead Prosecutor Jonathan Frieden and Escrow Account Manager Richard Hart demonstrating that Frieden pressed charges on hundreds of protestors under the pretense that Enbridge money would fund the prosecutions and pay for overtime.

Upon being informed by Hart that the MPUC permit would not allow the escrow funds to be used for prosecution, Frieden appeared outraged, responding,

“I disagree with the PUC staff […] I look forward to hearing why the multiple late nights and overtime hours by my staff to charge the individuals endangering the public don’t qualify under public safety. I assume the cost to arrest them is covered, just not to prosecute them? How does that make sense under the language you provide below.”

Frieden’s office ultimately footed the $12,207 bill.

Alongside the escrow, the MPUC permit contained another anomalous condition: that Enbridge not engage in any “counterinsurgency tactics or misinformation campaigns.” The language originated from a MPUC commissioner who said he was “not impressed” with the violent responses to Dakota Access Pipeline protests a few years earlier.

Energy Transfer Partners had contracted private security firm Tiger Swan to infiltrate, surveil, and quell the indigenous-led anti-pipeline water protector movement, which Tiger Swan claimed “generally followed the Islamist insurgency model.” Absurdity of the comparison aside, TigerSwan’s comparison betrays its militaristic roots as one of many private security firms created during the Iraq War to vie for coveted US government contracts.

From waging one unnecessary war to another, TigerSwan imported the same counter-insurgency tactics it used in Iraq against protestors in the Midwest. Reports obtained by The Intercept revealed that TigerSwan performed massive amounts of surveillance on activists, including ariel surveillance, radio eavesdropping, social media monitoring, and physical infiltration of protest camps.

In fact, Energy Transfer Partners explicitly tasked TigerSwan with collecting “information of an evidentiary level” that would “aid in prosecution” of protestors. This “information” included databases that housed “persons of interest” lists featuring dozens of DAPL activists, complete with license plates and photographs. Beyond surveilling opposition, TigerSwan worked to actively sow discord within the movement, creating and planting counterinformation on social media.

The parallels between Energy Transfer Partners funding of private police and Enbridge’s funding of public police run deeper than financial incentives. In the year leading up to Enbridge’s permit approval, Minnesota law enforcement assembled the “Northern Lights Task Force,” a multi-state, multi-agency network created to coordinate both the construction of the pipeline and the destruction of the pipeline’s opposition movement.

Northern Lights subcommittees plotted techniques to surveil protestors ranging from tracking phones to running smear campaigns, while police communicated with Enbridge representatives regularly. After construction began, police officials began to meet daily with Enbridge employees–with some sources asserting that Cass County police met with Enbridge officials several times a day.

If police served as the language of corporate power, surveillance was the grammar.

If police served as the language of corporate power, surveillance was the grammar. Water protectors regularly reported being trailed by police for miles when driving to and from protest camps. When police did pull an individual over for some minor infraction, they generally refrained from issuing a citation.

Verheyden-Hilliard, herself a recipient of this treatment, told The Intercept, “They’re seizing information. We believe that this is an illegal surveillance operation to try and target and collect the identities of people.” Aitkin County Sheriff Guida confirmed that police do collect intelligence during each stop, but he called the conduct “standard procedure.”

In another effort to surveil protestors, Enbridge purchased a plot of land next to the Namewag protest camp. Since then, drones have hovered over the homes of neighboring indigenous activists—some of them belonging to Customs and Border Protection.

“I don’t understand how surveilling, harassing and targeting people on a daily basis is not counterinsurgency,” said Tara Houska, a 37-year-old Anishinaabe water protector from Minnesota, in an interview with The Intercept.

Permits be damned. In 2021, Line 3 was declared operational. Tar sands oil now creeps through Anishinaabe lands.

Understanding Enbridge’s motives for funding local police requires little guesswork: Enbridge wants to build a profitable pipeline, and it wants police to protect this private project from public opposition. The question remains—why does Target care so much about funding local police?

Despite the retail giant’s Vice President of Internal Affairs’ insistence that “there’s no quid pro quo,” the SafeZone initiative was not borne from some twisted philanthropic impulse. Target was getting something in return: protection—of both property and brand.

Retailers have a long history of partnering with police to deter shoplifting, but Target’s collaboration is unique in its sophistication. In the 1990s, as Target grew frustrated with local law enforcement’s disregard for petty shoplifting, a chief security executive at the company decided to streamline the pathway to prosecutions by installing surveillance technology to build criminal cases against shoplifters in-house.

Retailers have a long history of partnering with police to deter shoplifting, but Target’s collaboration is unique in its sophistication.

Target’s technological sophistication evolved, and by 2003, the retailer ran a fully operative, state-of-the-art forensics lab in Minneapolis. The roles had officially reversed: local and federal law enforcement began asking Target to aid in unrelated criminal investigations.

Chris Nelson, Target’s former Director of Asset Protections, partook in one such investigation, working with federal agents for two years to pursue a crime ring. In an interview with the Washington Post, Nelson recounted how he joined SWAT agents in surrounding a suspect who “stopped short as he spotted me [Nelson] in the crowd and shouted, ‘What the [expletive] is Target doing here?!’” recalled Nelson gleefully. “I still love that one.”

[Above Photo and Header Photo by Nasir Nourkadi]

The SafeZone initiative can therefore partially be understood as an expansion of internal property protection operations to the surrounding community, extending the boundaries of corporate sovereignty from the store aisles to the city streets. “In many ways,” a Vice President for the company once remarked, “Target is actually a high-tech company masquerading as a retailer.

This high-tech surveillance served another, less tangible purpose: allowing Target to cultivate a “suburban” utopia in an “urban” setting—one guided by white consumers’ racialized notions of locational desirability.

The Target-sponsored report concedes that, empirically, downtown was safe. The concern laid in consumers’ perception that downtown felt unsafe, or “icky.” Fueling this perception, the report muses, could be the skyway system typically used by office workers that kept “law-abiding people off the streets, thereby reducing the ‘natural surveillance’ at the street level.” By connecting business leaders with social workers with police, the SafeZone aimed to replenish this stock of surveillance—both technological and human.

You pay public police to protect private power, and you hide under the umbrella of legitimacy that the state’s monopoly on violence affords. Above all, you profit.

Or, as Target’s former Asset Protection Vice President bluntly explained, “At the time, we were literally asking ourselves the question: as we expand into higher-risk areas, building stores in one of the boroughs of New York instead of a cornfield in Iowa, how do you keep the same shopping experience without spending five times as much money on security?”

Both Target and Enbridge arrived at the same conclusion: You subcontract. You delegate. You pay public police to protect private power, and you hide under the umbrella of legitimacy that the state’s monopoly on violence affords. Above all, you profit.

To be clear, the confluence between private interests and public violence stretches back to the very origins of modern police. In the South, formalized policing emerged from local militias and slaveowners who were empowered by the state, or “deputized,” to catch and force people who had escaped slavery back into bondage. Town watches served as the Northern equivalent of these violent patrols, however policing in these states primarily crystallized around union busting.

After formally establishing itself in 1867, the Minneapolis Police Department quickly assumed this mantle of protecting private property. In 1888, MPD officers brutalized and mass arrested striking streetcar workers, allowing industrialist Thomas Lowry to emerge from the labor uprising without conceding a single demand.

MPD-led union-busting emerged as a pattern throughout early 20^th century, while private interests eventually ossified into their own form of union called Citizens Alliance, a far-right group of powerful Minneapolis businessmen. Eerily evocative of the Downtown Improvement District, Citizens Alliance held deep sway among the MPD—so deep, that MPD repeatedly deputized the group, allowing its white and wealthy civilian members to legally use violence against strikers.

At the same time, police cracked down hardest on Black residents of Minneapolis. In 1922, officers savagely beat and arrested four Black men for allegedly inviting a white women to a dance. During the notorious Aquatennial Parade of 1967, police sat idly by as white mobs attacked Black attendees with glass bottles and fists. Violent racism, in short, has defined Minneapolis police from its inception.

Violent racism, in short, has defined Minneapolis police from its inception.

So the privatization of Minnesota’s police must be understood as not a perversion of purpose, but rather a full-throttled embrace of the original function of police as enforcers of white supremacy, protectors of private property, and opposers of collective action. Policing in both Target and Enbridge prove as much—white supremacy over Black and indigenous people as the underlying logic, protecting private property as the ultimate aim, and suppressing collective action as the violent means.

With corporate dollars flooding police foundations around the country, the line separating public policing from fully private security grows more tenuous each day. Already, the United States hosts over two times as many private police personnel as public police. Just as private citizens in early America could be deputized, these modern-day for-hire guards can also wield the coercive power of the state.

The University of Chicago, for example, retains one of the largest private police departments in the nation, with a jurisdiction that stretches deep into the surrounding community absent virtually any accountability mechanisms. In Boston, certain low-income housing projects have historically been policed by private security firms that wield limited arrest power and work in tandem with police.

The “town watches” of early policing also seem to also be resurging—residents of the upscale Lowry Hill neighborhood in Minneapolis concerned about “rising crime” offered to pay the city $210,000 for extra police protection. In a 12-1 vote, City Council approved the transaction. Progressive councilmember Aisha Chughtai voiced concerns that privatizing public services would result in worse outcomes for marginalized communities. She voted for it too.

This increasing entanglement of private police within the daily fabric of American life mirrors the global trend towards privatization of state violence. Half of the planet’s population now lives in countries where private security officers are more ubiquitous than public police.

Countries where wealth inequality is widest experience this disproportionate ratio most acutely. South Africa’s burgeoning private security industry now outnumbers the public police force three-to-one. There, privatization of policing functions has further impeded progress for Black folks attempting to overcome the remaining structural violence of apartheid.

Both the water protector movement and the George Floyd uprisings have endorsed defunding police as means a to reach abolition, yet the presence of private police presents a confounding variable; right-wing libertarian groups practically froth at the mouth for an opportunity to fully privatize policing. Sirdar, drawing on Target’s arc of involvement in the SafeZone, seems to think that corporations would rather preserve the status quo than move towards full privatization. “They always intended to outsource the costs of this,” said Sirdar.

And they succeeded: as the surveillance beast it built grew self-sufficient, Target’s funding of the SafeZone has since dwindled to higher property taxes, its role shrunk to a board position on the Downtown Improvement District. The retailer now reaps the benefits without fronting the funding.

And they succeeded: as the surveillance beast it built grew self-sufficient, Target’s funding of the SafeZone has since dwindled to higher property taxes, its role shrunk to a board position on the Downtown Improvement District. The retailer now reaps the benefits without fronting the funding.

Since its inception in 2003, Target’s SafeCity initiative has spread to over 25 cities throughout the US, inflicting untold violence on the lives of thousands and reaping undisclosed profits. Enbridge’s arrangement of directly funding local police remains the singular such instance in modern history. The tar sands oil still flows.

“The hallmark of 21st century policing is surveillance,” said Sirdar. “We usually just think of surveillance cameras but my deep dive is that surveillance is made up of two components, the technology side […] and the human […] side.”

DHS-branded drones hovering from corporate-bought land to watch over indigenous homes, business-owning white men whispering with Minneapolis police about Black residents through corporate-donated radios: Sirdar’s diagnosis strikes at the reality of modern policing. Surveillance lines the streets of today and threatens the horizons of tomorrow. But glimmers of hope surface in unlikely spaces.

In December of 2020, Minnesota Department of Public Safety Intelligence Coordinator Nicolas Radke emailed Enbridge representatives and police officials a report produced by the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services reflecting on the police response to DAPL protests. “The [After-Action Report] is the best document I’ve read in 10 years of working for the state!” wrote Radke. “I’d recommend reading it word for word.”

In the section reflecting on surveillance efforts, police admitted to surveilling social media sites, GoFundMe accounts, traditional media, aerial imagery, and other channels—nothing atypical—to gather information on the protests. However among the dispassionate, sanitized admissions of state violence lay one striking admission:

“The very nature of the protest was a limiting factor,” reads the report. “Non-Native Americans were often excluded from sources of information. This lack of human intelligence gathering meant that operations were for the most part reactionary instead of forward leaning and proactive in nature.” The indigeneity of the movement prevented police from infiltrating with outside informants.

Which is to say: surveillance may line the streets, but community—deeply-rooted, indigenous-led, Black-led, radically compassionate, and tightly organized community—fills them. And community can sustain them.

Although pipeline construction ended long ago, indigenous activists press forward in their fight: against ludicrous criminal charges from Line 3, against Enbridge’s newest proposed pipeline, Line 5, and for a livable future that centers indigenous stewardship of land over corporate profits.

For his part, Sirdar continues to expose the legacy of harm that Target’s carceral laboratory left behind in his city. “I’ve been trying to blow the whistle on this for over a decade,” reflected Sirdar. “But I didn’t have the information then that I have now.”

When asked if he has experienced any retaliation for his storytelling, Sirdar did not hesitate. “Yes.” He paused, “I can’t share more publicly, but yes.” Sirdar is undeterred—his research on the next part of his series continues.

For an explosive moment in 2020, the rage simmering in Minneapolis for decades boiled over. Enbridge executives may take comfort in knowing that their oil reaches its destination. Target PR-strategists may exhale after dressing their stores’ formerly-smashed windows with murals praising unity.

But the rage is still simmering. The reporters are still writing. The community is still here.

* * *

[First and Fourth Photos by Nasir Nourkadi]