#476 – Life in the Minnesotan Upside Down

This week I did my best to serve our users and customers, despite the escalating horrors around me.

I’ve decided to voice this week’s Friday Ship in the first person, and focus on my own experience living and working in the city of Minneapolis. I’m Parabol’s only employee here. I’m also Parabol’s CEO.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the pretense and theater of professionalism was eroded as we caught glimpses of what real life was like in each other’s homes – children screaming, messy bedrooms, or perhaps the challenge of eldercare. We also experienced dissonance at the inevitable, “ok, shall we move on to the first point on our agenda?” as we’d shift gears to business. This week, here in Minneapolis, there have been days this week where I just haven’t been able to do my job.

While the killings of Rene Good and Alex Pretti provoked worldwide outrage, the realities of day-to-day existence here, of trying to work and live here, I find really aren’t being communicated well. To my colleagues, investors, users, customers, advisors and friends: this is one small attempt to give you a window into what it is like.

Minneapolis is sometimes called a “city in a park” because our dense urban and suburban neighborhoods are surrounded by the highest per capita area of parkland in the country. My family and I live in an affluent enclave up on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. Our neighbors are college professors, doctors, and executives at Minnesota’s many Fortune 500 companies.

The neighborhood is exceedingly upper-midwestern in its character. When we moved to the neighborhood, we were invited to join a dinner hosted at a different neighbor’s house each week (yes, there is hot dish!) We share codes to enter each other’s garages (”just borrow any tool you need, no need to tell me.”) After a snowfall, there is an unspoken contest for who can clear the block’s sidewalks first. What I’m trying to say is: people know each other well and they take care of one another. We have trust.

A phone’s camera only captures a narrow slice of reality. The algorithms bias for views and engagement. Reality is understood in context. Here are three events, all occurring in Minneapolis within 30 minutes in one afternoon.

A man is walking his dog when he sees several ICE vehicles arrive at Roosevelt High School, in pursuit of a man who identifies himself as a teacher at the school.

It’s the end of the school day. Students and teachers are filing out. Within moments the school is completely surrounded. First, by a ring of federal agents. Second, by a ring of neighbors with whistles and cameras.

Some of the students throw insults and snowballs. The agents respond with by shoving, tackling, deploying mace and tear gas. A teacher is thrown to the ground and arrested.

A few blocks away, two women sit in a car. They are watching, observing. They are ready to record. They want to capture the moment a neighbor is abducted. They are observers. They want to know who is taken so their family can be notified, lawyers can be called, and due process is given a chance. They see a car pulled partly across the street. It is an ICE operation.

The driver, Renee Nicole Good, sits behind the wheel. Another vehicle approaches. Good waves it through. It passes. Masked federal agents move toward the car. Neighbors whistle and shout. A woman—Good’s partner—stands behind the vehicle, filming an agent, arguing. Phones are raised on both sides.

Unmarked vehicles arrive and block the street. Red and blue lights flash. Agents order Good out of the car. The Honda Pilot shifts into reverse. An officer grips the driver’s window frame and door handle as the car back up a few feet. The front wheels are angled left. The car stops. It moves forward again. The steering wheel turns right—away from the agent standing in front-left of the vehicle.

A gun comes up.

Three shots are fired in rapid succession—less than a second apart. The first bullet goes through the windshield. The car continues forward, passes the shooter, and rolls on. Seconds later it crashes into a parked car and slides into the snow. Good’s partner runs to the vehicle. A bystander yells “shame.”

More agents arrive. They form a perimeter around the car. Good remains inside, unmoving.

A man identifies himself as a physician. He asks to help. Agents refuse, saying their medics are coming. No medics come. The coroner later reported she was likely alive during that time.

Firefighters arrive more than six minutes after the shots. They pull Good from the car and begin CPR.

She is carried away on a stretcher.

The news from Roosevelt and Powderhorn reach a group of neighbors near Green Central Elementary School. They are just blocks away. Two dozen adults dress for winter weather, come out from their homes, and link arms to form a perimeter around their elementary school. Inside, the students and teachers go into lockdown. As federal agents pass the school, they sing songs and ward them off. These parents and neighbors want to keep their children away from violence.

This all happened within 30 minutes. There are between 3 and 4 thousand agents within the state, with the vast majority operating within the Minneapoils/St. Paul metro area. Day or night, there are dozens – if not hundreds – of violent and unprovoked encounters between agents and our residents each day.

As I write this on January 30th, everybody I know has a story of how Operation Metro Surge has directly affected their lives. I’ve personally tended to neighbors who have been assaulted by agents who didn’t wish to be recorded. Two of our elderly neighbors were forcibly removed through their driver’s-side window just for keeping watch on the neighborhood. This form of assault and arrest is so commonplace, the site of cars with broken glass is no longer noteworthy.

Many people in our lives have been hurt, handcuffed, detained or all three only for not having white skin. Walking alone, shopping, commuting are no longer safe if you don’t look European. Nearly all of our friends who have been targeted are U.S. Citizens.

Two blocks from our elementary school, federal agents deployed tear gas and shot observers and neighbors at close range with flash bangs. Surveillance aircraft circle our neighborhood low and at all times of the night. Every day we worry that our kids will be caught up in this madness, that they’ll experience violence that will affect their lives forever.

Each evening brings new stories of unwarranted escalations, arrests, assaults, detentions, and requests from neighbors too afraid to leave their home for food or medical attention. It takes a lot of energy to not chase the answer to the question, “where is this all headed?” too far.

For those of us that work, somehow we still show up. If we work at home, every Zoom meeting is a window out to the relative peace of every place that isn’t Minneapolis. But we wonder, how long will that peace last?

Society fundamentally runs on trust. We put our trust in humanity in culture, of how we expect to be treated. When humanity fails we put our trust in the rule of law and the courts. We put our trust in the law because we expect the law to be applied evenly, and when it doesn’t we expect that law to be evened out.

Today we see the law being applied unevenly to U.S. Citizens and lawful immigrants based solely on the color of their skin. The United States has an agreement enshrined in its constitution and laws for how it treats its citizens, green card and visa holders, and in the case of refugees and asylum seekers – individuals with temporary legal status. Over and over again we see this trust violated in arrests, assaults, in- and out-of-state detentions (even requiring individuals to find their way back home from thousands of miles away on their own expense!), and wrongful deportations.

Our trust in law is the dam that holds the floodwaters of chaos in society together. When that dam cracks in one area, like here in immigration enforcement, it puts trust in all of society at risk. If petitions of habeas corpus should fail, why should I trust that my petition for redress of a business matter be treated fairly?

When the law fails you put your trust in humanity. As the days have become more difficult I’ve deepened my connections with my neighbors, the parents of my kids’ classmates at school, family, and old friends. We’re making it through by building up our ledger of trust with each other in our shared humanity. It feels good. It feels meaningful, urgent, and important.

If you know anybody in Minnesota, now would be a good time to reach out.

Two short instagram updates I recorded on events in Minneapolis:

Bi-partisan Senate hearings on Operation Metro Surge:

There was a sharp increase in MAU but a sharp drop in the number of the number of retrospectives run this week. What could be the cause? Was it the general strike?

…continue to work on SCIM and search. We’re focused on much-requested SCIM provisioning capability for our Enterprise customers and robust and performant search for Pages. We’re well on track and looking forward to getting both of these capabilities into production soon.

…tracked down some more inconsistencies in our data pipeline. Our data pipeline required some more fix ups as we prepare for a board meeting next week. It turns out there were still some bits of code that needed changing after we updated Airbyte’s HubSpot connector.

…met with customers interested in use Parabol’s API. We quietly released OAuth 2.0 provider support into production behind a feature flag. Coincidentally we had a customer of ours reach out to us, looking to see if they might be able to use our API for a neat internal application. Good timing!

…complete week 5 of 6 of Shape Up Cycle 12.