Below is from the Minnesota Reformer as discussed on Friday's Justice and Drew Show.
The Twitter post featuring the photo that went viral — over 13,000 retweets and counting — said the church was harboring people “hurt by police violence” during an April 12 protest over the police killing of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, during a traffic stop the previous day.
“This was how the cops responded,” Mischa Coldwater wrote.
Except the troopers weren’t guarding the church, they were guarding the police station next door — although it isn’t pictured in the photo.
Maj. Melanie Nelson, spokeswoman for Operation Safety Net, said the State Patrol troopers in the photo were staged there to respond to any potential unrest.
“There just happened to be a church in the background,” she said.
Simeon Momanyi, pastor of the Kenyan Community Seventh-Day Adventist Church, said they opened their doors to volunteers to distribute food and supplies, but closed at curfew time. It wasn’t open when the photo was taken.
He said police were pushing protesters back from the police station — not the church — because it would be easy to break into the police station from the church parking lot, since the fencing on the church side is weak.
“They were preventing people from going into the parking lot,” Momanyi said.
The photo was taken by Scott Streble, an independent Minneapolis photographer, who said the photo “got loose.”
“I didn’t know what to make of it,” he said. “I’m bummed that there was so much misinformation about it. I felt like I was powerless after it got out.”
He tried responding to some people to set the record straight, but it was impossible. “It was too overwhelming. I quit.”
Asked about it, Coldwater said she wasn’t there when the photo was taken, and mistook the photo for a Lutheran church that she says was targeted by police. She said a journalist reached out to tell her of the mistake, and she linked to his thread in her thread.
Streble, the photographer, said it’s hard to figure out what’s going on in the photo, but he felt the troopers were using the space to stage and “look intimidating” before dispersing protesters. He saw some people claim the troopers were guarding a white supremacist church.