Ebony Dobbins, a Black mother of three, was asleep in her bedroom when she says that officers entered her home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, without a warrant. “My dog had gotten loose. My son had put him outside, and we ended up falling asleep.
Next thing you know, we wake up, and we have guns in our face,” she said to The Final Call. The reason officers gave for them being in her house, she says, is, “they stated that they thought that my kids were home alone.”
Ms. Dobbins posted ring camera and body camera footage of the March 25 encounter online on social media. In the footage, officers said they were pounding on the doors and windows for an hour and that they entered after looking through the windows and seeing the children asleep in their bedrooms. One officer entered the home through a bedroom window before letting the other officers in through the front door.
“Your back window is open where your son is sleeping at. That’s how we came through. Make sure you lock it,” an officer said to Ms. Dobbins, according to the video footage.
The officers also accused Ms. Dobbins of co-sleeping with an infant and threatened to file a report with Child Protective Services. Co-sleeping is when a baby and typically their parent are sleeping in the same bed or surface.
According to a Minneapolis Police Department general offense and case report, “Officers responded to a loose aggressive dog. Animal control responded to capture the dog.
Officers entered the home to make sure the residents were safe.” However, what occurred has left Ms. Dobbins shaken. “I was violated. I don’t feel comfortable at home,” Ms. Dobbins said. “I don’t feel safe.”
So, when it comes to President Donald Trump’s recent executive order, titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” her main question is: “Is it really going to help?”
The order and its impact on state and local levels
President Trump issued the executive order on April 28. The order aims to “establish best practices at the State and local level for cities to unleash high-impact local police forces; protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by State or local officials; and surge resources to officers in need.”
Per the order, by June 27, the U.S. Attorney General will review ongoing federal consent decrees, out-of-court agreements and post-judgment orders affecting state and local law enforcement agencies and modify or rescind measures that “impede the performance of law enforcement.”
By July 27, the U.S. Attorney General and Secretary of Defense, in consultation with other agencies, will increase military and national security assets to assist state and local law enforcement.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) defines an executive order as “a written directive, signed by the president, that orders the government to take specific actions to ensure ‘the laws be faithfully executed.’”
Some executive orders take effect as soon as the president signs the order while others may take time or provide a deadline, according to the ACLU. Executive orders can affect federal funding provided to state and local governments.
The executive order instructs the U.S. Attorney General and other department and agency heads to use federal resources to bolster state and local law enforcement.
This includes providing so-called new best practices to aggressively police communities, improving training, increasing pay and benefits, strengthening and expanding legal protections, seeking enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers, promoting investment in prison security and capacity, and increasing investment in crime data.
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has warned Black people about the consequences of law enforcement tactics used in the Black community. He has warned that Black people must unite and work to make their neighborhoods clean and decent places to live so that we may protect our own communities, thus lessening the need for outside law enforcement.
Minister Farrakhan has cautioned that the heavy-handed tactics and military style equipment police possess will be used on Black communities, as well as the deployment of National Guard troops.
He spoke on some of what happened during protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in the aftermath of the police killing of Black teen Michael Brown Jr. in 2014.
“Now all the police forces are being given weapons that are only used in military theaters of war. So, when you see the police armed like they are: That’s not to ‘serve and protect,’ that is to kill. Look at the military force that came against the people in Missouri:
When I looked in the faces of those police, you could see the hate in their eyes! And in one video captured by CNN, a police officer was standing there, saying: ‘Bring it, all you f-ing animals! Bring it!’
They have a desire to kill us wholesale,” Minister Farrakhan warned in his message “The Troubled World: What Should We Be Doing?” delivered at Mosque Maryam in Chicago, Illinois, on August 17, 2014.
Dr. Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and Black Lives Matter grassroots, criticized what she sees as the government’s desire to “give complete immunity to police to do whatever it is they want to do; to kill us, to criminalize us, to deport us.”
“It means that’s what law enforcement does or what police do, there will be no accountability and no repercussions for their abuses. And we know that it’s very rare anyway that police are held accountable, but the ‘strengthening and unleashing.’
I think the ‘unleashing’ is the most illustrative of what they’re saying that it is a complete gloves-off abuse that’s allowable,” she said to The Final Call.
Dr. Abdullah also pointed out the effects the order may have on protesters, citing the possibility of more violence directed at them. “We can expect everything from criminalization to increased brutality as well as surveillance and all of those other forms of law enforcement police abuse coming as the executive order takes hold,” she argued.
Nick Kellum, public information officer for the National Black Police Association and founding president of the organization’s Minnesota chapter, has been in law enforcement for almost 30 years.
He weighed in on the order but recognized that law enforcement officers do go out and risk their lives and pointed out that certain things in the order may make sense. But he described the order as having a negative tone.
“Those negative tone words, ‘unleash.’ It almost makes you want to think you’re going back to when your grandparents and my grandparents were afraid to go outside at night;
When there was only one officer of color on a police department, and the only thing that officer could do was arrest someone that looked like them,” he said to The Final Call. “They say the Constitution was for everybody, which was not true, and it hurts when you see it. It hurts when you put a uniform on.”
Activists are concerned that this “unleashing” will give police even more excuses to target Black communities, which are already disproportionately impacted by violence by law enforcement.
Data and statistics show that Black people are already disproportionately more likely to be shot and killed by police than Whites, more likely to be pulled over in traffic stops, and in “stop and frisk” situations.
According to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit that tracks police shootings and data, Black people make up approximately 13% of the U.S. population but are 2.8 times more likely to be killed by police than White people.
“There have been 59 days so far in 2025 when police killed Black people in the U.S.,” noted mappingpoliceviolence.org. If or when aspects of the new executive order are enacted, could those numbers increase?
Cephus “Uncle Bobby” X Johnson, a social justice activist, believes the new executive order will cause law enforcement officers to be more shielded. His nephew, Oscar Grant III, was killed by former Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, California, in 2009.
Statistics also reflect that law enforcement officers are rarely charged or convicted of wrongdoing or misconduct in many cases.
“The fact that they will provide them with legal defense and support and money. Even if they are so egregious and they’re arrested and there’s a bail placed on them, they’re going to bail them out.
Dress them up and provide the funds that they need for the best representation,” he said to The Final Call. Both he and Dr. Abdullah expect the “open season” on Black people by law enforcement to continue.
“It’s like turning the dogs loose, giving them more power to do much more than what they have already been doing. It definitely gives us less protection.
It gives the police officers the tools to continue to do misconduct without even really thinking about it,” Mr. Johnson said. “Just the idea psychologically that they know that now they can be aggressive and not be concerned about whether they are unjustified in their aggression.”
“You have local government officials that say, you know what, if I prosecute a bad cop, we’re going to lose our job. We’re going to lose our taxpaying dollars to protect communities of color, because now they’re going to feel unsafe, because they know that a dirty cop can do what they want to do because they know,
‘we’re protected’; not by local government, not by state government, the federal government’s going to come in and take care of us,” Mr. Kellum said.
Dr. Abdullah believes the “unleashing” of law enforcement may primarily happen on the local level. “Whatever happens at the federal level signals what’s allowable at the local level.
And what we have not seen is state law enforcement or local law enforcement be willing to counter. In fact, they see it as an opportunity for them to go even further,” she argued.
Many of the organizers interviewed by The Final Call also expressed concern for immigrant communities that might be affected by increased raids by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a federal law enforcement agency that operates under the Department of Homeland Security.
To serve and protect whom?
The recent law enforcement order was issued a few weeks before the five-year commemoration of the death of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.
“I think the timing of it (the executive order) is grotesque. Anybody that knows anything about the history of this country for the last five years knows that the case of George Floyd was a lightning rod to get people to pay attention to what we have been saying is a problem for a long time,”
Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality, an organization based in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, said to The Final Call.
She accused the president of attempting to reverse the mass movement built in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Studies showed a surge in police officer resignations after the murder of George Floyd.
Ms. Gross thinks numbers could still drop, but that with the new executive order, rogue officers will see it is an extra layer of protection, which will make the overpoliced, underfunded Black and poor communities greater targets.
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan teaches Black people the origin and the solution to this problem. Black communities have become colonies and unlike White, Asian, or other communities, the police are not in Black communities to serve and protect but are there
“To make sure that the savagery of our community does not spill out and upset the White community, and the business community.” He spoke these words in a message delivered at Muhammad Mosque No. 11 in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 26, 2016, titled, “Who Is The Natural Enemy of the Original Man?”
He made a clarion call for 10,000 Fearless men and women to lead these efforts, which would lessen the need for the presence of outside law enforcement that may harm or target Black people. He originally made this call in 2015, leading up to “Justice or Else,” the 15th anniversary commemoration of the historic Million Man March.
Mr. Johnson is an advocate for the Black community policing themselves instead of looking to others for protection. “What we can do is begin to learn how to not depend on the police to come to our communities to do the work that some of us can do ourselves.
We need to develop ways and means to have our own crisis intervention team show up, ways and means to end the hostility that might be going on in the streets,” he said.
“We just have to be more proactive in educating our youth on how to deal with those stressful situations where they might want to do something that can bring the police,”
Mr. Johnson continued. “It’s just going to have to center around, what are we willing to do to help protect ourselves rather than to call the police to come in and call themselves protecting us,” he concluded.
“The 10,000 Fearless: We have to be the ones to stand in between the guns and the gangs. These are not bad youth; they are youth that have never been given a proper education and guidance, and opportunity, to make a better life. That’s not for White people to do, that’s for you and I to do,” Minister Farrakhan said in his 2016 Boston message.
“I don’t see any government being angry with us for wanting to take control of where we live. If the government is angry with us for trying to control and own where we live, they have manifested as the Enemy, and that demands complete separation in a state or territory of our own,” said Minister Farrakhan.