“We Must Never Throw Anyone Away”: A Call for Policing & System Transformation Through Relational Accountability

By Kayla Richards

Kayla Richards (she/her, Oglala Tituwan Oceti Sakowin) is a fifth-year PhD Student at the U of M and was the Director of Community Impact at the MNJRC. Kayla transitioned in July 2025 and is now the Research Manager at the CEDAR Center at the Native American Community Clinic in S. Mpls. 

What follows is a reflection born from an MNJRC community gathering, rooted in teachings that stretch back much further—to my Unci La’s kitchen table, to circles of accountability both always here and emerging, to the space between what we've been and what we might become.

Choosing Transformation

Five years have passed since the murder of George Floyd, fundamentally shifting our collective consciousness in Minneapolis and around the World about policing, justice, and what safety in community looks like. In July, the Minnesota Justice Research Center gathered folks together not just to remember, but to reimagine the kinds of questions our community in Minneapolis had been asking for five years. Our goal was to shift from “what has changed” to “how have we changed?” 

Our event took place at the Twin Cities Urban League in North Minneapolis. It drew community members from the neighborhood, activists working against mass incarceration and police violence, academics, the MDHR/Mpls Consent Decree Monitor, Effective Law Enforcement for All (ELEFA), and members of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). Historically, at the MNJRC, our community conversations follow a predictive and intentional pattern: context setting and a container for supportive dialogue amongst community members, followed by a large group discussion to bring everyone together and honor our shared and different contexts. This event felt different. Like it needed to be different. How might we support our community to think about the possibility of transformation? 

Our programming involved an overview of formal and informal tools to support police accountability–tools that bridge both system and community accountability: a review of the goals and utility of the MN POST Board, strategies for community members to be best familiar with the work of the Consent Decree with the support of ELEFA, and an introduction to an informal and community based strategy, the “Police and Black Men” project in Minneapolis. 

But then. We asked members of the Police and Black Men Project to join myself and Dr. Bill Doherty, Police and Black Men Project facilitator,  in a restorative circle in the middle of the room. We left a few chairs open and asked that community members tap one another in and out over the course of our facilitated dialogue while we considered questions like, “What does justice mean to you when it comes to policing in our community?“What barriers–both personal and systemic–make it difficult for police and Black men to see each other as partners in community safety?” “What would successful police accountability look like if it included community partnership rather than just oversight?” 

What unfolded over the next hour felt like a trip home. A return to something that felt familiar, a place that exists between remembering and practice. Community members, Black men, and uniformed police officers passed around a talking piece and sat together. In circle. In dialogue. Group members tapped one another in and out of the circle, and our community unfolded. The presence of conflicting truths. The revealing of wounds and resilience. A few bridging moments of resonance. 

Relational accountability. Transformation. 

The Comfort of Reform, The Risk of Transformation

My family is from a large reservation in South Dakota, and I spent a lot of time witnessing the impact of systems that punish survival strategies and perpetuate the very conditions they claim to remedy, the conditions they have created since their inception. Growing up in a place of contradiction, strength and beauty, responsibility and accountability, nested inside of generational poverty, trauma, and efforts to cope. It was there that I first understood that formalized state-sanctioned systems of support (e.g., welfare, child protection, youth probation, policing, etc.) rarely changed the quality of the life of those I loved. 

The discourse around our current systems is full of talk about reform–adjustments that fundamentally keep the system, like policing, the same. It feels like repainting a house with a crumbling foundation—the new color might look better, but the structural problems remain, much like what I witnessed growing up. Reform gives us the comfort of taking action while leaving the deeper architecture untouched. It might provide us with better training for police officers or more humane prisons, but it doesn't question why we respond to social problems with punishment rather than prevention.

Transformation demands that we dig deeper. It requires us to ask not just "How can we make this system work better?" but fundamental questions like: Why does this system exist in its current form? Who designed it? Who does it serve? Who benefits and who is burdened? How do I uphold these systems, and how might I do things differently?

The Circle of Transformation Can’t Be Invite-Only

Growing up with my Unci La, Theodora Dori “Tiny Girl” Siers, I learned several lessons about community, about relationship, and about accountability. My Unci La passed away a few years ago, and I often wonder what she would say about the current state of things, here in Minneapolis, and more broadly, across the United States, and in other places around the World. 

It was not uncommon when I was with my Unci for her phone to ring, and an apologetic and detoxing voice on the other side to ask for money. She always answered, and when she didn’t have it, she would find someone who did. Family members often poked at her, asking her why she would continue to support so and so, and why she would call on her other children and ask them to support the callers. There was one particular evening when my Uncle Jimmy had called–he was in jail, again, and was calling about bail–he struggled with his anger. He was often arrested for physical violence while intoxicated. People in community told lots of stories about him.  My Unci spoke to him on the phone with her usual stern voice, said to him that she loved him, and after hanging up, shushed the listening ears in the room and simply said, with deep conviction,  “Of course we will help him…we must never throw anyone away.” 

We must never throw anyone away. Those words echoed in my mind as I sat in the fishbowl circle that July evening, watching community members and police officers share the same space. My Unci's teaching suddenly felt both more urgent and more complicated in a room where principles were becoming practice. I couldn’t help but think about all of the people who had been harmed, even killed, by police. I thought about people in my own family who had caused serious harm. I thought about the police officers that I know personally and respect tremendously. Was I oversimplifying the needs of one group over another—was I flattening harm that had unfolded over centuries in an effort to give myself, a professional and practitioner, comfort? Was I trying to reward my efforts? 

And then I thought of my Unci. And I remembered. That protection and harm often come from the same well-intentioned hands. That healing rarely happens in isolation, and that we must all work to create circles where everyone is redeemable. Even when it feels impossible. We can’t throw people away and expect to live in a world where people feel accountable to their neighbors. 

Transformation requires us to resist the urge to resolve contradictions prematurely, to sand down the edges of community for the sake of a false promise of safety. Our current systems and practices, our reform efforts, focus on the simple containment of harm through isolation. But transformation asks us to hold the incongruence that authentic relationship and accountability demand. 

As a community member, mother, and scholar interested in community-engaged research and formal institutions, I often draw from Indigenous concepts of relational accountability, as articulated by Dr. Shawn Wilson, in “Research is Ceremony.” I’m learning that transformation requires the embodied demonstration of respect, reciprocity, and responsibility even when it feels vulnerable, risky, and unearned. But understanding transformation as a concept is different from building it in real time, in real communities still healing from fresh wounds. This is where theory meets the sidewalk, where principles become practices. My Unci La would say this is where we have to swallow the hard medicine. 

The Messy Work of Building What Comes Next

Transformation requires us to think about what comes next, not just what we want to be rid of. It's not enough to dismantle harmful systems; we must actively build systems rooted in community wisdom and collective care. This means:

• Creating pathways for those who have caused harm to engage in genuine accountability, repair, and healing

• Building community-based safety strategies that address root causes of violence

• Developing economic and social structures that minimize the conditions that create harm

• Fostering healing practices that don't rely on punishment and exclusion

  
  

So many moments I’ve experienced in community and spaces like George Floyd Square embody these tensions—a space that holds grief and hope, protest and healing, division and unity. These contradictions aren't obstacles to overcome but realities to hold as we do the difficult work of transformation. 

Values in Action

Perhaps this is what my Unci La understood all along—that true transformation isn't just about changing systems—it's about embodying our values when engaging with one another. And my Unci La might also say that it’s about supporting systems, staffed by our neighbors and relatives, to be good relatives too. It means:

• Practicing relational accountability: Maintaining connections even when it's difficult, recognizing that we're all part of an interconnected web

• Choosing courage over comfort: Being willing to imagine and build something that doesn't yet exist

• Embracing complexity: Refusing to reduce our community's story to simple narratives of good versus evil

• Building with, not for: Recognizing that sustainable solutions come from communities, not imposed upon them

  
  

Our Role in Transformation

"Commitment to Progress: Five Years Later" wasn’t just another forum where experts talked at community members. It was an invitation to become architects of transformation.

When we gathered on July 10, I committed to: 

• Asking the hard questions about who our current systems serve

• Examining how I uphold harmful systems and how you might do things differently

• Envision what comes next, not just critiquing what exists

• Building power with those most impacted by systemic violence

• Remember that I’m accountable to others, even those I might not know, maybe even those generations to come

  
  

The Choice Before Us

Five years later, we face a fundamental choice. We can continue with reforms that make our unjust systems slightly more tolerable, that shift the margins while maintaining the center, or we can choose the harder path of transformation—one that requires us to reimagine not just our systems but our relationships to one another. And not just our relationships to people we invite into our circles. 

This choice between reform and transformation is not just about strategies—it's about what kind of future we believe is possible. Do we believe in a future where some people are disposable, where safety comes through separation, where healing attempts to happen in isolation? Or do we believe in a future where everyone belongs, where safety emerges from connection, where those who have caused harm can find their way home? Where we aren’t throwing people or the possibility of a different relationship to community safety away? 

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After the event, we spoke with attendees about their takeaways from the 2020 Uprising, how they’ve changed since, and how they felt about the conversation that evening. Watch the short video here: