Six Years Before the Fire: A Night of Civic Power Outside Minneapolis' 3rd Precinct

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – November 25, 2014 — Long before the world watched the Minneapolis 3rd Precinct go up in flames, thousands gathered in the cold just blocks away—outside its sister station, the 4th Precinct, to raise their voices in a show of unity, defiance, and truth.

This video, captured on that night in 2014, tells a story many never heard—because few were listening.

In the wake of the murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and just two months after the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, community members in Minneapolis—home to large Black and Latinx populations—took to the streets. Not to riot, but to organize. Not in reaction, but in commitment to a long fight that had already begun.

On the back of a commercial truck parked beside the precinct, Latinx volunteers spoke directly to the crowd, denouncing the “systemic brutality” that plagued their communities—brutality not as anomaly, but as policy. Their words echoed across Lake Street, not just in solidarity with Ferguson, but in defense of every child of color who lives beneath the threat of uniformed violence.

The precinct they stood in front of, now infamous, would become the center of international attention six years later, when four on-duty officers stationed there were captured on camera killing George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, during a routine stop. But on this night in 2014, the crowd wasn’t reacting to that tragedy. They were warning of it. They were naming the crisis before it made headlines.

For years before the world saw Minneapolis burn, people here had been gathering, protesting, documenting. They knew what was coming because it had already been happening. Their grief didn’t begin in 2020—it had simply been ignored until then.

This footage is more than a protest—it’s a receipt, a record of a community exercising civic responsibility in the face of state violence, and a warning that justice delayed is never peace preserved.

This is the consequence of ignored peaceful pleas to end systemic genocide from 2013-2020: the same location, six years later, now engulfed in the fire of public reckoning.

Suggested Reading

Two Months After Ayotzinapa, a Cry for Justice Echoes in Minneapolis (Additional Speakers)

Disappeared, Not Forgotten: The Ayotzinapa 43 and Mexico’s Crisis of Justice (Case Study)