We are approaching a breaking point in our communities. In every city neighborhood and in many of our suburbs, carjackings, armed assaults and shootings are daily occurrences.
Teenagers should not be losing their lives at the hands of other teenagers with guns. Nobody should be afraid to go to the grocery store or drop their kids off at school. Parents should not be losing their children or loved ones because of police misconduct.
We’re facing violence in all directions and we need leadership to respond with real, meaningful solutions. We need to pull together the people and the organizations in our communities who can help stop the violence – and we need to do it now.
The issue with leadership is clear: We’re experiencing a failure of governance over the police department in our largest city. There are many ideas being thrown on the table, but we haven’t seen tangible action to address the shortcomings of the Minneapolis Police Department. The policies of city leaders are not being carried through in daily practice and that is one of the reasons we’re seeing so much distrust in the community.
That distrust creates cracks in our foundation of justice and public safety – further-undermining confidence in our institutions and allowing violence to fester and grow. And too often, young people and families of color are paying the price for that ineptitude.
In February, we had two 15-year-olds killed by other community members – and near school buildings, which should be the safest places for our youth. A 22-year-old was killed by the Minneapolis police, and a 17-year-old was arrested for the murder that led to the 22-year-old’s death. Tragedies like these only compound each other.
To break this cycle of senseless violence, improve the safety of our communities, restore trust in our institutions of public safety, and break down the bias that has warped our justice system for far too long, we must work together.
First, we need to empower the work and voices of community leaders who are deeply engaged in finding real solutions. We’ve seen incredible leadership from community groups who have taken the initiative to provide community-based prevention methods and solutions for rising crime. While community member engagement makes a difference, these groups can only do so much without city, county and state leaders providing additional resources.
Our elected leaders must build better partnerships with the organizations that are intervening to stop violence daily, and who provide a pathway out for troubled young people. These partnerships should provide avenues for civic leaders to listen to community members and then provide with what’s needed for success and for communities to thrive.
[image_credit]Array[/image_credit][image_caption]State Rep. Ryan Winkler[/image_caption]
In concert, the Department of Public Safety should convene a metro-wide gun violence and armed-assault task force to address the rise in violence and save lives. That task force must include community leaders – nobody knows our communities better than the people who live in them.
Working hand-in-hand with community organizations, judges, prosecutors, law enforcement, and others should sit at the same table, identify problems, find the resources for prevention and solutions, and act together.
As we do the urgently-needed work of changing our public safety systems, it is still the responsibility of law enforcement to protect and serve residents. We need to enforce the law and make individuals accountable when they hurt others. But we can’t try to recycle a repressive system and hope for better results.
That’s why the state needs to support efforts to recruit a new generation of police officers with a proven commitment to community service. Communities are looking for more diverse officers. We need a joint effort by public safety leaders and community members to recruit, train, and support those diverse candidates.
We can also look to successful, community-oriented police departments – like in Newark, N.J., or New Haven, Conn. – who have regained the respect and trust of their communities as models. All of this reinforces the need for stronger leadership that delivers results, not just prepared remarks.
Most importantly, prosperous communities are safe communities. We need to break down barriers for the small businesses, homeowners, civic and cultural organizations, and religious and community leaders who are the foundations of community prosperity. The parts of our community which have received the least investment should be our priority for support and growth.
We cannot continue as we have been going. There are so many people doing amazing work right now and we need leaders who can find the money to support their work for our whole community. None of us can do this work alone.
Ryan Winkler is the Minnesota House Majority Leader, an attorney, and a candidate for Hennepin County Attorney.
Mpls has been a burnt out, crime riddled, no man’s land for 2 years, time for talking is over! At some point the police, with the help of DA, have to put dangerous criminals in jail. Whatever Mpls is currently doing (hard to say exactly what that is) has not worked! All you see is politicians talking while crime runs rampant! Enough talking, someone take action.
Hyperbole much? Both Minneapolis and St. Paul gained population and continue to have high property values which is real evidence that you don’t know what you are talking about. Obviously, you have no real ideas since you simply repeat FOX talking points and double suggest doubling down on everything that has led to the current failure. A country with by far the highest incarceration rate in the world due in large part to policing for-profit and a militarized police force that views the community it serves as enemy combatants.
Do you know what states have higher rates of violent crime than Minnesota? Alaska, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, South Carolina, South Dakota, Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, Alabama, Texas, Kansas, Georgia, Florida, Indiana, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and a number of others. That includes every neighboring state. In general Republican-run states generally have higher rates of crime and perform worse education and health metrics as well.
Conservative “law-and-order” rhetoric is designed to appeal to fearful simpletons & racists and has been since the Black-Codes implemented after the civil war. This is why they were happy to have the support of the white supremacists at AFPAC and CPAC.
Have you been to Nicollet and Franklin? The CVS that has been robbed at gun point numerous times? Across the street from the Starbucks that shutdown because the homeless were drinking in front and urinating and fighting? Or the liquor store (where I worked for 4 months but quit because I no longer felt safe) that was looted multiple times and they finally gave up on replacing the windows and installed metal grating? Or how about the parking lot of Family Dollar where an open air drug market sprang up and drunk men play dice all day long? Have you been over there? Cause I lived in that neighborhood and loved it for almost 20 years until this past summer when finally I could no longer stand hearing gun shots all day and all night and moved. The city leaders should be ashamed.
You seem to be confusing my rebuttal of Mr. Smith’s hyperbole with a claim that crime doesn’t happen or that something shouldn’t be done. But the property values and population increases show that Mr. Smith’s “Mpls has been a burnt out, crime riddled, no man’s land for 2 years” isn’t credible. Meaning his opinions on the subject are likely wanting.
The problem is that the centuries-old, repeat ad nauseam “law-and-order” ideas have failed over and over. Largely because they weren’t developed to actually fight crime. They were designed to scare the public of poor, minority, and other oppressed populations and then lock up those people for political gain. This structure has caused more crime than it has prevented by creating large parts of our population who are placed into a criminal justice system that is often hard to break free of. Terrible, violent, unaccountable policing that treats whole populations like enemy combatants pushes those populations away making cooperation and prosecution difficult as well.
Having a massive incarcerated population and still having a relatively high rate of violent crime in this country attests to this fact. The fact that Republican-led states tend to have higher rates of violent crime adds evidence to this. Reducing crime must start with making law enforcement accountable because without that they don’t have any credibility and will never be effective. Forces outside of the city make that a hard thing to do. Police unions would rather protect the criminals within their ranks than fight criminals on the street and have political support from conservatives at every level. Qualified immunity and years of case law that assume cops are the good guys along is part of how this manifests as measurably racist outcomes in the criminal justice system. When 40% of cops admit to domestic abuse while they are only able to solve 2% of significant crimes it seems strange to think that giving them more resources is going to have much positive impact unless something significant changes first.
That’s odd. I live in Minneapolis, and hadn’t noticed it was a burnt out, crime riddled, no man’s land. There are problems to be sure, but I notice that you’re talking and as far as I can tell, not taking any other action to help.
Couldn’t have said it better. Nobody wants to do anything because that would mean putting black kids in jail. And the far left, who run the city, will not allow this to happen. I’m not seeing anything good coming out of this situation. All of the “focus” groups ( was it Violence Prevention task force? ) is a great sound bite. But until the kids committing the crimes go to jail it’s not going to stop.
Ms. Larey, MPD routinely arrests and jails black people (and teenagers). They kill black people on the street, and in their couches, and living rooms. Several people have been arrested for car jackings (including black teenagers) and they are all sitting in jail. The idea that liberal radicals control MPD and prohibit the arrest of black teenagers is so disconnected from reality as to be nearly delusional.
Check out the BP shooter already out on bail
“… a burnt out, crime riddled, no man’s land…” That’s almost laughable.
Yesterday I was downtown during the day and I saw office workers moving about the skyway. We’re obviously never going to get back to pre-pandemic levels thanks to work from home and hybrid models, but that’s going to be the norm everywhere. Street traffic has increased. Stores are reopening. Now that COVID restrictions are lifting more downtown companies are preparing to return (at least in hybrid form) to their offices this spring. Yes we have a crime problem, but your assertion that our city is some kind of burnt out no man’s land is ridiculous.
Mike go down to the Loon for a drink at 10 pm on any night and report back on the traffic and business happening. Thank you
Joe, do you even live in MN or are you just watching Fox new reports while living in SD or something? And you do realize that it’s more than an coincidence that we’ve been dealing with a pandemic for the last two years… it’s not all about crime.
Paul, now that an election is coming up and the “pandemic “ is over, Mpls should be bustling, let’s see if it’s COViD or crime. BTW, I still have a place in the Twin Cities, have already had COViD and know my natural immunity will protect me but still won’t go to some of my favorite places in Mpls. Has nothing to do with COViD and everything to do with safety.
Joe, hopefully some day you can stop living is so much fear and return to the city you love much.
Why not mention the “leadership” that failed by name? You know, the guy who ran for his first term on police reform and completely failed to deliver, and doesn’t appear to have any intention of delivering during his second term either. It’s not surprising that people are starting to feel their patience Freying.
“We’re experiencing a failure of governance over the police department in our largest city.” Perhaps we are experiencing a failure of folks to have respect for governance and institutions, including the justice system, and from this perspective, need look no farther than the dysfunction at the state capital between the R’s and the D’s for a shinning example.
ASTUTE.
What MPLS and St Paul need is the end of the current communist regime that has run these cities for the last 5 years. The two idiot mayors lack any and all semblances of leadership, but then it is the DFL and its boy minions. Look at who has controlled the cities, and show me anything accomplished by them. Instead, we have mayors, governor, AG, SoS, city and county attorneys’/prosecutors’ all a part of the same political party which has been devoid of any leaderships since its inception.
Then we have Winkler, running for county attorney who touts his ivy league education but claims he was not making racial comments when he referred to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as “Uncle Thomas”.
Challenged by angry conservatives on Twitter, Winkler, a Harvard-educated attorney who has served four terms in the Legislature, initially claimed that he didn’t realize “Uncle Tom” was considered a racial slur. https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-dfl-rep-ryan-winkler-s-uncle-thomas-tweet-ripped/213061571/
Just another example his poor judgment as we see in most of his interactions in the legislatures. It’s all about him and how he can advance his own agenda. Why should this individual be considered for any office, or for that matter any elected office. Who would ever listen to this clown?
Representative Winkler, I am so disappointed in your thinking here. Seriously, I don’t even know where to begin. I have no interest in or need to embarrass you in public. Your lack of understanding about the real problems in Minneapolis, and much worse yet, the absence of new viable solutions, is unfortunately going to seal your fate. Look! I am not an extremist on the left right political spectrum. Not at all! You could be proposing real-life, down-to-earth, unmistakably doable, truly revolutionary new solutions for the problems in police-community relations in the City of Minneapolis. Instead you come up with this?
Don’t worry. He has no real solutions. He’s just campaigning for his new job. (Literally and seriously.) You don’t have to have ideas to win an election, you just have to convince everyone that the current ideas are wrong.
Winkler is correct in recognizing the importance of listening to community leaders, supporting small businesses and institutions and that “the City of Minneapolis, and Hennepin County need to work together to advance community intervention strategies, jobs and activities for youth, mentoring, and counseling.” Quick fixes are not possible. Attacking leaders, as commenters and protesters tend to do, is not a long-term solution to all the problems. It just adds to the divisions.
We need fathers with good jobs in the home, as well as support for women and children. None of the stability everyone wants is possible if all we do is continue to blame and punish the mayor, police, and reckless youth looking for a way to prove their manhood. Without sensible action to deal with drugs and guns and to improve basic health and safety for all, nothing will change for the better. I look forward to the ideas people have for long-term structural improvements.
Representative Winkler is correct when he says that the problems within the MPD cannot be fixed without fundamental change. The MPD has been beyond civilian control for over 50 years. In order to change, I think one viable approach would be to set a date, say Jan 1, 2023, after which all MPD personnel, (cops, supervisors, and Chief) will start over. If anyone wants to continue their employment after that date, they will have to re-apply for their position. Cops and supervisors with complaints of “excessive force” or other evidence of misbehavior should not be re-appointed.
I know cops from other jurisdictions who have stated privately that they would never consider working in the MPD because of the “us vs. them” orientation of the Minneapolis cops. I don’t know how one can change that attitude with piece-meal solutions or incremental change.
What I find ironic is that there was a big push to protect mostly black men from police, but the result was a dramatic increase in the number of dead black men, almost entirely at the hands of black men.
Is it still OK to say something like that in Minneapolis without being charged with a crime or being censored?
I guess I’ll find out.
You observation isn’t “ironic”, it’s pure fantasy. No one ever made protecting black men a priority. Black men are targets, that’s why they keep getting killed.
I like Ryan Winkler and I endorse him for Henn Co. Prosecutor. However I think this article is rather much a nothing burger.
It’s been bloody obvious for decades that we have a policing problem in the US and in MPLS so no one gets a medal for recognizing that. We’ve been admiring this problem for a very long time, and more collective admiration (i.e. working together) doesn’t look like a antidote of any kind to me. We don’t need another description of the problem.
Their are two problems with (well maybe three problems) with the idea that we’ll all work together blah blah blah to “reform/transform” policing. First, this has already failed, I’ve been hearing about community involvement and community leaders, and whatever since the 1980’s so this isn’t a “new” prescription of any kind. Second, I don’t know what this actually means, without identifying effective people and programs that can actually produce results this is just inclusive speechifying. And I KNOW that if you’re talking about expanding non-profit involvement you haven’t been paying attention. The State, County, and City have thrown millions of dollars at multiple non-profits over the decades that were supposed to reduce violence and crime with little or no effect. Not the least of the problems is the near complete absence of any vetting, credentialing, or auditing process to evaluate results or even prevent fraud. KSTP just aired a story about millions MPLS has dumped on 6 or 8 local violence prevention non- profits that don’t even have to deliver written descriptions of what their doing or even provide accounting for their money they receive. So if THIS is part of your solution you need to be talking about a lot more than simply bringing more people into the conversation, you need to be talking why that approach has thus far failed and how you think you can do it right.
A possible third problem with this idea of community involvement is I’m not sure it really makes sense. I think what’s missing is effective leadership by those who are already supposed to be responsible. Typically attempts or claims to involve the community (like Frey’s 30 person working group or “task force”) actually obscure and diffuse responsibility. We’ve seen this before in the private and public sector. The leaders who are supposed to deal with problems create or hire a group of some kind and then hand of the problem to them. I’ve never seen this “work” in any reasonable sense of the term. More often than not it’s just a way to spread blame and responsibility around rather than take ownership of power and do the job.
I don’t think we need the community to tell us what the problem is, we live in this community and we already know what the problem is. What we need is leadership that figures out what to do and then does what needs to be done. The solutions are already out there. There are people who have been studying and documenting the militarization, alienation, and hostility of law enforcement for decades, and solutions have emerged. We don’t need “new” models of community involvement and we don’t need to start from scratch as-if no one has ever discussed this before.
Recruiting new a better cops is a no brainer, but as long as they’re being recruited into a police force that has guys like Chauvin training the new recruits you’re dealing a system that designed to fail. Right now one third of the trainers at MPD are Chauvinistas so I don’t how you talk about changing the culture without putting that problem out front. Likewise changing the culture at MPD cannot be done without labor contracts that establish civilian control and discipline rather than nullify and replace it with requirements that keep bad cops on the payroll and invalidate civilian commands.
Finally, while building better communities with strong businesses etc. etc. is always an elementary civic objective, let’s not loose sight of the problem at hand here. I don’t see how we attack the problem police violence and homicide successfully by widening the mission beyond recognition, that looks lofty speechifying that ultimately moves us back towards admiring the problem. We don’t have to turn MPLS into a paradise of any kind to stop cops from acting like an occupying force that occasionally kills the innocent people they’re supposed to protect and serve. Let’s finish our coffee and get our arms around police violence and crime fighting. Making the city a better place is an ongoing project that never ends. Police reform is a critical mission that needed to happen decades ago.
The police violence problem is certainly about the police. Part of the rise in crime is also certainly about the police. I agree that the MPD needs to be scrubbed from the top to the bottom to remove the rot, but it probably also needs a new, well-defined contract with the city, and some safety barriers/transparency on how the operate.
However, the entirety of the crime problem is not about the police or the city government (or even the state or federal government, though they all have a role). There are other, social and economic factors at work, and no one seems to want to seriously consider identifying /exactly/ what those factors are or how to mitigate them (if not solve them). And even if we know exactly what some of those factors are, we don’t define them clearly, and there’s a whole lot of generalized commentary about how to do something about it. Solutions and projects need to be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable/actionable, relevant, and time-bound), or it’s just a bunch of pontification. Not that I’m accusing you of such, Paul. I’m more generally talking about the “leaders” who like to write for/campaign in the Community Voices part of MinnPost.
Thank you Rachel,
I wish we get a little deeper into the weeds regarding specifics, data, and analysis as well but this can be a difficult format for that kind of discussion. And no one pays me to write this stuff so I have to decide how much work product I want to volunteer 🙂
Right?
Not that data and research in a comment section does anything to inform anyone but the author because almost no one bothers to look, and even if they did, they don’t change their minds.
Representative Winkler, it’s possible I would consider you when voting, depending on who else is running. I’m not in Hennepin County, though, so my vote won’t be yours to take. That said, while I fully agree with your goals, if I were a Hennepin County resident, I would want more specifics. These are generalizations and not even new generalizations at that. Yes, MPD needs to be more community oriented. Commenters on this site, who aren’t even “important people” (though, I find most of them to be thoughtful and intelligent, and therefore important to me), have been saying that for a LONG time. Everyone knows that MPD cops need to have a better relationship with the community, but HOW? I mean, certainly, choking the life out of someone in front of a crowd is counterproductive to that, yeah? That’s an extreme example, but it wasn’t the first concerning behavior that Chauvin exhibited toward the people he policed, and worse, he TRAINED other officers. How do you recruit new, better, more diverse officers when the current officers (which can’t just all be fired) control the culture and training of new officers? Do you hope that, if elected, your job will be to prosecute all of the bad apples? Good luck with that. The bad behavior has to be caught and reported first. And, unfortunately, that rarely happens because the victims of bad police behavior often have little power to do anything about it, and the Police Department has a culture of hiding it.
By the way, it would have been great if the hyperlink associated with “Newark, N.J., or New Haven, Conn.” would have gone to a relevant article instead of a Yahoo News site.
And what of the organizations/community groups who are supposed to be helping the situation? Do they have specific plans and accountability? The City and State are already sending money to them and have been for a while. Don’t get me wrong, it’s usually a Republican thing to do to complain about spending money and then give money to their favorite causes without any accountability because businesses and churches are inherently trustworthy (/sarc/). But the same could be said of non-profits and Democrats.
And if it’s a matter of elected leadership not listening rather than monetary support, then WHY isn’t elected leadership listening? It’s not like the Mayor and City Counsel of Minneapolis are unique in this aspect. Many citizens in this state and in this country feel profoundly unheard by their elected representatives (ask me how I feel about Tom Emmer). I’m certain you recognize that things go on behind closed doors (see, the publicly funded Vikings stadium…) that no one outside the room will ever know what happened and why. So, what are the political pressures preventing Minneapolis’ elected government from listening to community leaders and their ideas? Or perhaps, those leaders don’t really have any more specific solutions than you do? Are we just suffering from a disconnect between what’s essentially just a philosophical debate, and the expectation that someone is going to translate philosophy into results without identifying the concrete problems and solutions?
Yeah, the problem with politicians who promise to solve problems by being more inclusive is this actually ends up highlighting just how exclusive they typically are. Essentially this reads like a promise to think about setting the normal special interest parties with special access aside and listen to the “people”, community whatever. But we live in a representative liberal democracy wherein our elected officials are supposed to “listening” to their constituents as a matter of course all the time, this isn’t supposed to be a new approach to a unique problem. So you end up circling back to the question: “Haven’t you been listeing?” and if not why not? Sometimes the more you talk about bringing in new voices the more we focus on why those voices have been excluded and by whom? One question provokes the other, hence the danger of platitudes Ms. KIahler refers to.