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Monday, September 27, 2021

Minnesota Attorney General Ellison authors an editorial explaining how he views the policing/public safety chrater question, and why he believes it necessary to see it passed.

Strib published Ellison's editorial, here. A rather lengthy but helpful excerpt:

Part of the problem is that other things you may have heard are not true. It is just not true that the amendment will eliminate the police department, defund the department or fire the chief. Nothing in the actual language says that.

What is true is that the majority of us have the drive to change and the will to hope for a safer and more just city, regardless of how we vote.

My opinion is that while many Minneapolis police officers, including the current chief, have served many people well over the years, good people inside the status quo aren't enough by themselves to make fundamental change: we need a systems change. The charter amendment creates the possibility for the kind of systems change we need by integrating the Police Department into a new Department of Public Safety that includes other safety services like the Fire Department and the Office of Violence Prevention. It frees us up to plan and invest comprehensively for how we define safety today.

The police-only model that we've relied on for decades no longer works for large parts of our city: too many people in communities of color, who want and deserve the same level of safety that exists in other parts of town, are fearful of calling the police when they need protection. That makes everyone less safe in every neighborhood, but it's understandable, given the long history of police killings in Minneapolis of unarmed people, mostly African American — from the elderly couple Lloyd Smalley and Lillian Weiss, killed in a botched drug raid in 1989 with no accountability, to George Floyd in 2020, and too many in between.

Some people are worried the amendment gives the City Council too much control over the police. But the council cannot and will not manage the daily operation of the police department or any department. Under the current charter, however, the council has no power: It can't even pass a policy banning chokeholds. The charter change will allow the council oversight, not management or authority over daily operations. Most importantly,the public will have ample opportunity to weigh in on that issue and otherswhen the council passes ordinances to enact the amendment.

Others are concerned with the amendment language that the new department will employ peace officers "if necessary." Clearly, they are necessary: we still need armed officers to respond appropriately to dangerous situations. The amendment will free them up to focus on that work while mental-health professionals, social workers and violence-reduction specialists respond to calls about nonviolent folks in crisis, panhandlers, the unhoused— and fake $20 bills. 

Yes, the fake twenty was the genesis of events that left George Floyd dead and policeman Chauvin jailed for the crime of murder. Disproportionate force issues can be close calls, but with Chauvin on tape, the conviction was largely assured before trial jury selection even started.

Reform is needed. Two words prove it decisively. 


Bob Kroll.


Over the past five years, as demands for reform have mounted in the aftermath of police violence in cities like Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and now Minneapolis, police unions have emerged as one of the most significant roadblocks to change. The greater the political pressure for reform, the more defiant the unions often are in resisting it — with few city officials, including liberal leaders, able to overcome their opposition.

They aggressively protect the rights of members accused of misconduct, often in arbitration hearings that they have battled to keep behind closed doors. And they have also been remarkably effective at fending off broader change, using their political clout and influence to derail efforts to increase accountability.

While rates of union membership have dropped by half nationally since the early 1980s, to 10 percent, higher membership rates among police unions give them resources they can spend on campaigns and litigation to block reform. A single New York City police union has spent more than $1 million on state and local races since 2014.

In St. Louis, when Kim Gardner was elected the top prosecutor four years ago, she set out to rein in the city’s high rate of police violence. But after she proposed a unit within the prosecutor’s office that would independently investigate misconduct, she ran into the powerful local police union.

The union pressured lawmakers to set aside the proposal, which many supported but then never brought to a vote. Around the same time, a lawyer for the union waged a legal fight to limit the ability of the prosecutor’s office to investigate police misconduct.

The problem with lack of accountability, including the extreme difficulty in getting rid of bad cops, allows a kind of swagger that Kroll examplified, to the detriment of community control of its police rather than vice versa.

My favorite Kroll image, not him alone, but a pairing with Doug Wardlow, it being a screen capture from a video Wardlow thought would cause him rather than Ellison to become Attorney General - the picture showing graphically how community control of policing would have suffered had Wardlow won election - 

This image -

  


and this - abuse of the uniform being only one troublesome element where the entirety of the situation bodes ill -


If the two images do not presage in reader minds the follow-up of eight minutes of video of Chauvin's knee, (uninterrupted with three other cops present), upon Floyd's neck as Floyd, while handcuffed, went from alive to dead, then reader minds might be misjudging the likes of Kroll and Wardlow, each having overlapping world views capable of seizing power, indeed one election away from having prevailed.

Politicians willing to subjugate citizen control of policing to allowing mayhem to go unchecked, (as with citizen control of the national military going lax); those politicians come and go; and are why we need to fix a glaring problem with procedures to be later formulated to quell past problems being repeated. 

Why we need the charter amendment to start the process - as Ellison emphasized, in that sense, is a question perhaps best answered by noting Klobuchar in years as a top local prosecutor never prosecuted police misconduct, not even once. And Floyd is dead. Two facts - And the city's charter has wording being challenged for repeal.

Part of the problem, part of the solution - that question aimed at the charter amendment can really be focused upon not being able to enact the procedural reforms and solutions needed until the charter's presently included roadblock is removed

So- bottom line-

VOTE YES.