The finalists for the independent evaluator position meant to monitor court-mandated changes to the Minneapolis Police Department made their cases to community members during multiple forums last week.
Whichever team is chosen will supervise the implementation of the settlement agreement and consent decree between the city of Minneapolis, and both the Minnesota Department of Human Rights and the Department of Justice, respectively. The Minneapolis City Council will vote to approve a contract with one of them in the coming weeks and the chosen monitor is expected to begin their work by March 9.
Here is a deeper look at the three final teams, including their team members, past work and plans to facilitate the process in Minneapolis, if selected:
Effective Law Enforcement for All
Effective Law Enforcement for All (ELEFA) is a nonprofit founded by current president David Douglass. The team has experience as monitors in New Orleans and Baltimore, helping both departments implement their agreements with the DOJ.
The team includes several former police chiefs and other officials, like Michael Harrison, who was the police chief in New Orleans, which was being monitored by ELEFA and charged with making the changes laid out in their consent decree. Harrison said that kind of experience represents demonstrable proof they can do a successful job in Minneapolis if they are selected.
“This team is the only team made up of people who have been on both sides of the consent decree, the monitors and those being monitored,” he said in an interview. “And by the way, Baltimore was even more expansive than New Orleans, and so we have the experience of turning whole police departments around.”
Progress in both Baltimore and New Orleans have been largely favorable, including drops by more than 50% in overall use of force and not a single excessive force lawsuit during Harrison’s tenure. But the department began to experience some backsliding, and a DOJ filing last year, in response to the city trying to release itself from the consent decree, said excessive force and racially biased policing still plagued the department.
Though the monitors are there for support, Harrison said ultimately that it is on the law enforcement agency to make the reforms, and for the monitor to report whether they are complying or not.
“The monitor’s job is to monitor and report and to make sure the community is engaged and understands what the department is doing, whether they’re making progress in compliance or not, and making sure that we’re transparent in how we assess their compliance,” he said. “But the agency actually has to do the work, not the monitors.”
Jensen Hughes
Jensen Hughes is a law enforcement consulting firm featuring attorneys and former police officials. The team conducted the “After-Action” report for the city following the unrest in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder.
It also conducted similar assessments of police departments in Chicago, and in Louisville after Breonna Taylor’s killing, and serve as the monitor for consent decrees in Bakersfield, California, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
“We appreciated the opportunity to engage with the Minneapolis community and look forward to the review,” said Jensen Hughes’ Debra Kirby, whose past work includes recommending improvements to the national police force of Ireland. “We believe the agreement will bring positive changes for the stakeholders in Minneapolis and we would welcome the chance to be a partner to the process.”
Despite the firm’s experience with multiple consent decrees, several community members have expressed their concern about Jensen Hughes being chosen as the independent evaluator.
Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality, said the “After-Action” report the firm conducted demonizes protesters and seeks to absolve the department of officer misconduct that involved targeting journalists and use of excessive force. The report, she said, is a harbinger for how Jensen Hughes will approach the monitor job.
“The whole gist of the report was ‘if you were better organized, you could have put down the uprising faster,’ and it wasn’t anything like ‘maybe don’t kill people so people don’t have a reason to protest,’” she said. “That is really appalling.”
Relman Colfax
Relman Colfax is a civil rights law firm based out of Washington, D.C. whose team boasts members from different professional backgrounds.
Those members include Christy Lopez – a former DOJ official who led the Civil Rights Division’s pattern-or-practice investigation into the Ferguson Police Department following the killing of Michael Brown by police – and Iris Roley, a Cincinnati activist who ensured robust community involvement in the agreement between the Cincinnati Police Department and the federal government in the early 2000s.
The firm did not respond to a request for comment.
The Relman Colfax team has already had an impact on the consent decree process in Minneapolis. In 2021, before joining the monitor team, Roley came to Minneapolis for a week, meeting with Gross and CUAPB and laying out what to expect and how to maximize community involvement during the DOJ’s investigation.
What followed was more than two dozen meetings held by CUAPB and more than 2,300 experiences between MPD and Minneapolis residents collected by the organization and relayed to DOJ officials during their investigation.
“We’ve been heavily involved from the beginning but (Roley) was a person that gave us a lot of direction in the very beginning of the process,” Gross said. “I feel like she played a big role already in getting us into a good place in the community with this.”
