On Monday, February 13 there was a public safety meeting held in the Henry High media center with our 4th Ward City Councilmember LaTrisha Vetaw and Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara. There was a very good public turnout.
Councilperson Vetaw said she wanted to have this meeting because residents sometimes ask her questions that she can’t answer because she’s not the chief of police. She said everyone at the meeting would get to ask one actual question, because folks in our Ward 4 like to make comments. After Chief O’Hara spoke for 10 minutes giving us a personal overview, the question and answer time began. Of course, almost everyone had a comment to go along with their question.
The chief started out talking about how he’s been going to houses of worship and schools to get to know the various communities because he’s not from Minneapolis. He had been at Henry for the North vs Henry basketball games two days before and had been at Edison that morning. He then talked a bit about his background in law enforcement in Newark, New Jersey where he is from. He said that Newark, like Minneapolis, had issues with gun violence, police community relations and had been under a federal consent agreement which Minneapolis will likely have in the near future.
The chief said that he believes “the most important issue we have to deal with is just the outrageous amount of gun violence in Minneapolis.” He said that while the number of shootings have been on a declining trajectory recently, there’s still an unacceptable number of victims, in particular young victims, of gun violence. He also talked about how all this is happening while we are down by hundreds of police officers in the City of Minneapolis. He made the point that this is a complex problem because this is a time when officers clearly need to be out engaging in communities, but that’s particularly hard when the work load and the amount violence needing to be investigated is way higher than it’s been in a generation.
Chief O’Hara became the most passionate when talking about juveniles who are committing crimes but then being sent back out on the streets right away. He adamantly stated that, “being locked up is not the solution”… but having police constantly arresting the same kids in stolen cars, with guns and everything else, and then they’re being released back into the community without any type of monitoring, consequences, or services that can lead to them being shot or killed. One 12-year-old was shot twice in one month! O’Hara has parents begging for help and there’s nothing he can do, and he wants that to change.
The chief also spoke a lot about recruiting new officers, especially from the community. He wants to see better pathways for young people in our city to become police officers. Also, before any officer applicant is rejected, he needs to be notified to see why they are being rejected and needs to sign off on it, and no officer recruit is dismissed or released from trying unless he knows about it.
O’Hara talked about community engagement and how he wants new officers in particular to go out with a community member to get to know the community and its people. When asked about PAL (police activities league) and the Bike Cops for Kids programs he said that PAL is back. He is also looking to see if some retired officers would be willing to come back to help with that.
All in all, it was a very informative meeting and Councilperson LaTrisha Vetaw and Chief O’Hara said they would like to continue to have these meetings.
You can view a video of the public meeting online at 4th Ward Council Member LaTrisha Vetaw’s FaceBook page.