The ZOOM hybrid meeting was called to order at 6:36. Ten people attended at Monroe Village and nine attended remotely.
Our invited speakers are Elliott Payne, Member and Chair of the Mpls City Council, and MPD Sgt. Conan Hickey, President of the Minneapolis Police Federation
Elliot Payne, Ward 1 CM and CC President, began by stating he was relating only his own perspective. He emphasized: he does not speak for the entire Council.
Work on the contract started with a meeting of CC members, bringing what they wanted in this contract.
CM Payne’s primary goal was to reduce the staffing shortage. That could be done by:
- Compensating officers for the work they do.
- Bring MPD pay up to what Officers can get from other cities. A one-time bonus doesn’t change the pay rate. A long term pay change would make up that difference.
- Adjusting the ratio of officers to investigators.
- MPD currently has a 70/30 ratio of officers to investigators, which limits the number of officers on the force. If you need more of one, you have to hire more of the other. That rule is based on numbers, not need.
- Shift-bidding needed a different approach. “Shift-bidding” is a process where officers get to “bid” for their preferred shift and precinct. Officers with more seniority get priority in this process. The issue: if an officer’s work is raising concern of their supervisor, they could bid their way out of that supervisor’s control.
Some council members advocated having “civilian investigators” to be there when citizens want callbacks or need to file a complaint or follow up on an investigation. It’s important work, but if all officers are needed in squads, that work can’t be done. When the MPD was fully staffed, civilian investigators weren’t needed. Most investigations were done by sworn officers — sgts. and up.
With the low level of staffing now, the backlog of cases needing investigation has been growing. Permitting civilian investigators with relevant experience or training, will reduce the backlog. That person would not have to be a higher-ranking licensed police officer to review the complaint.
CM Payne believes that some CC members voted “no” on the contract because they wanted those things written into the contract. The reforms are there, but only in Letters of Agreement. [EQ: see https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/Download/RCAV2/45743/Executive-Summary-for-Minneapolis-Police-Federation.pdf]
The contract needed to be signed so the CC could address other challenges.
When Minneapolis faced George Floyd’s murder, and the subsequent uprising, and spike in crime, we lost sight that there are serious management challenges that we need to fix in the MPD. There are also serious community challenges we need to manage. “How do we get to those better outcomes?” is the conversation that I wanted to have.
We have 10 laterals (officers in other agencies) who want to come to MPD. This is new. People now are saying they want to work for Minneapolis. They say it’s not so much about the money, it’s more about the reputation of the MPD. Having a better reputation helps recruiting. Right now, we have 25 people in the hiring pipeline, including those 10 laterals, and 15 people in the Police Academy.
CSOs – Community Service Officers – are younger folks who are not ready to go to the Police Academy. They get their education paid for by the MPD while they’re working for the MPD. They do support work for the MPD, learn what it’s about, but until they finish their education, they are not working in the field. Then, they can start police training.
We budgeted 50 CSOs. Over 100 people applied. But we’re at 25. Why?
Minneapolis has barriers in our hiring process: Candidates are held up by background checks. Our our staffing can’t do that many checks, so we needed to contract them out. Then the system stopped the process to write a contract to do those checks!
Police Reform is partly about policing and how officers conduct themselves in the field, and partly about policies and procedures and training. But Police Reform is also management, bureaucracy, and red tape.
People have been saying that Mpls. Police are bad at being police. They say there’s no accountability.
What they don’t see is those management challenges, those accountability and oversight challenges, that exist in all the departments across the city. All departments are hampered by old, outdated processes that are blocking people from doing good work. Every department in the city has them. We need to start thinking about that.
Think about it: The City Council passes the budget — that’s a core responsibility. We can pass a budget for 50 CSOs. But if we don’t have management practices in place that can staff those positions, we’re dead in the water.
Creating a contract has three steps: the substance of the contract, the process of approving the contract, bringing the community along.
The third part is as important to me as the first. I insisted on making opportunities for the public to weigh in, whether in support, in opposition, or what they would have preferred to see in the contract. This was an open and transparent process as much as it can be. [EQ: to find scheduled public hearing meetings,
see https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/CityCouncil/Meetings]
At a closed session with all Council Members, we asked questions of our labor relations team. Any of the organizations that had been doing official advocacy one way or the other, also had an opportunity to present in front of the Council and have those comments documented for public record. The process of how we got to their approval was as important to me as the substance within the contract.
Again, the City Council can’t negotiate technical provisions in the contract. All we can do is vote the whole thing up or down. If we had voted it down, we would have gone back to the negotiation table and we might have gotten some different provisions there, but if you vote it down, you are likely to get an impasse. Then the next step is arbitration where none of us has any say in it. It’s completely up to the arbitrator. They may get rid of all of the reforms that we won in negotiation. They may revise the numbers so salaries are lower, but it would have likely been the same technical language. I felt we’d written some reforms significant enough that it was not worth the risk of losing those reforms.
When we had the tentative agreement (i.e. the union and the city agreed to the terms), the next step was for membership to vote on that contract.
[EQ: Payne related an incident from several years ago when he was working at staff level and not on the CC] When the Council was creating new responses to people in crisis, he observed some pushback and felt that initiative wasn’t supported by leadership of some divisions. Some media reported, “It’s City Council versus the mayor.” Payne said, “I don’t know that the mayor was involved at all.”
In the media, this work for people in crisis was called “abolishing the police”. It was actually about the creation of a department of public safety that included the MPD. The intention was to bring in mental health responders, to make investments in mental health, to make investments in people struggling with substance abuse, to support homeless people. Yes, there are going to be police in that mix as well.
We all agree that we don’t want crime and violence but how do we bring down that crime and respond to it when it happens? Looking at Juvenile crime: Do we have programs for kids after school? What are the parents like? What social, emotional skills do the parents have?
There are also conversations about emergency response: what kind of 911 calls should police be responding to v. what kind of 911 calls should be handled by other professionals or civilian investigators. If there’s a [minor] car accident, do you need to send a police car or can we send a civilian investigator, to make sure there’s an ambulance if needed, to take pictures of the scene, to put together a report for your insurance company? That’s what we were working on.
The media framed it as “anti-police”. That’s how we ended up in this place. And this is not a Minneapolis-specific problem. This is a society-wide American problem — polarizing.
I feel like a lot of it is just driven by our media ecosystem. We have newspapers that are failing; newspapers are losing advertisers so they don’t have enough reporters to do thorough reporting. Reporting becomes kind of a simple headline-capturing news. The real story is not as interesting.
QQ: The MPD had no contract for 18 MONTHS and 2 weeks! When I asked why they didn’t go on strike, Inspector Torborg answered that the MPD is not allowed to strike.
Officer Hickey amplified the response: By Minnesota law, “Essential Services” are not allowed to strike. That includes MPD, MFD, EMTs and other groups that are considered essential services. EQ: School teachers CAN strike, but the Facility Teams that keep school buildings running CAN’T. See https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/179A.18
This meeting continued with Officer Hickey’s report.
MPD Sgt. Conan Hickey, President of the MPD Police Officers’ Federation
I’ve been a cop for 22 years. I’ve been in Minneapolis for 10 years. I worked briefly in the city of New Hope. I was a Deputy Sheriff in California. That Sheriff’s Office is bigger than MPD. New Hope was very small. That’s three departments of varying size.
People in Minneapolis saw problems, and started saying it’s the worst department ever. Absolutely not true. You see the same problems at other agencies. I’m not saying they can’t be addressed or they shouldn’t be addressed, but Minneapolis is not the worst.
Minneapolis has some of the finest cops I’ve ever worked with — phenomenal cops. You have cops that are showing up wanting to do this hard work. That gets lost in the miasma of noise, media, politicians. Your ground cops, cops that are pushing patrol cars, are some of the best I’ve ever worked with. I’ll stand by that. They absolutely deserve this contract.
The biggest hurdle we had to get over was the recall for reform from all over.
The reforms that people are asking for, have to come from the Minn. Dept. of Human Rights, and have to be approved by the MN-DOJ. [EQ: https://mn.gov/mdhr/about/overview/ and https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/divisions#civil ] Then the reforms can be implemented by Mpls and MPD administration. That includes contracts, labor, wages, scheduling, all that. Like others, I didn’t understand this at first.
I learned by analogy. So bear with me. A contract is like a car; every year, they change it, just a little. CM Payne mentioned all the MOUs, memos of understanding, and LOAs, letters of agreement.
Let’s say we want to make a temporary change — we’re going to hire civilian investigators. But if we’re still in the middle of our contract, instead of doing a whole new contract, we write up an MOU or LOA, that says we can hire civilian investigators and attach it to the contract.
Now we’ve got a new set of rims on the wheels.Over the years, those LOAs build up; they don’t go away but people don’t find them or remember them. After a while, we’ve got this car, our contract, and we have all this extra baggage on it. That “baggage” is temporary, like the rest of the contract.
The team writing this contract did a great job of stripping out those little additions and tweaks.
Now everything’s clean. We’ll see how it plays out.
CM Payne Comments on Policing:
The police system asks you to sacrifice a lot of yourselves. Your long hours, your really traumatic experiences hit your family. A lot of people leave the force with PTSD.
One of our lawyers is a former Marine. He was comparing what PTS is like for a combat Marine versus a police officer. He thought the traumas for police are not really comparable with the trauma that you experience in combat.
[Combat trauma] is like a spike and then it’s over. [Police trauma] is very different. You don’t know what’s going to show up and if you’re going to hold it.
What we ask of our officers doesn’t seem fair to how they have to do their work. Police don’t have the resources necessary to respond to some of the calls. There are some common calls — the frequent flyers — people who just don’t have a strong social safety net. If people nearby can’t handle them, the last resort is “Call the police.”
[Police] are dealing with a lot of things that would be better dealt with with a safety net, which we don’t have. For example, there are a lot of people who [are on an] intersection of homelessness and substance abuse disorder, and they are living on the street. If they’re doing something that is really disruptive to the community, the police get called.
Oftentimes the issue isn’t something that calls for arrest. We might charge them for trespassing. Then we take them in, process them, and they’ll be out, right back to where they were. It’s a constant loop, because trespassing is not a crime that gets them locked up.
We don’t have to have a facility to take that person so they could get help. It doesn’t exist. None of those facilities exist.
Homeless shelters. I’m talking about people who have very severe mental health disorders and the homelessness is a secondary outcome of (maybe) a severe mental health disorder. But we don’t have an institution that they can live in.
We have jails. Jails have a very little mental health space, and it’s for very, very short term.
If there’s somebody who just has a severe enough mental health that they need to be in some sort of long-term institution, those institutions don’t exist.
Instead of building those spaces, we ask the police to respond to whatever behaviors are disruptive to our community. But Officers are just not equipped to help somebody like that.
On Central Avenue, you have folks who are not homeless, but are struggling with substance use disorder, or other issues. They get into certain behaviors that are livability challenges for the rest of us, and the police just don’t have the tools to help them.
QQ: What about COPE?
CM Payne: Same. COPE doesn’t have that. [EQ: https://www.hennepin.us/en/residents/emergencies/mental-health-emergencies]
1900 Chicago Ave. is a drop-in center where officers can bring people. They have a very limited bed capacity..
Steele: When I’m critiquing policing, I’m critiquing our system that puts police officers — individual human beings who have good character and spirit — into an impossible situation. We need to change the structure of how we’re approaching safety so that all of the people who are helping keep our community safe, have clear things that they can respond to the community with that’s actually going to help. That’s going to take a long time.
Officer Hickey: Yeah, I guess I would just like, again, to say thank you [to Elliott] I appreciate your help. I appreciate your support for us through the contract.
There’s a long road ahead. This is not a quick fix.
I was the front line of all the riots in 2020. I watched Third Precinct burn. I remember telling [a person] who’s no longer here; he had severe PTSD. But I remember distinctly telling him, we’ve got 10 to 20 years. We’re built for this. People are going to be villainized, and it’s going to fall on our shoulders.
Payne(?) It’s a long road. I’m glad you’re okay.
Hickey: Thank you. I’m okay. I’m glad we made it through that night. It was wild. It was very scary.
Hickey: I do want to address one thing with you. Okay? When you came to the second precinct after you first got elected, you told those officers that you were scared to be there because you thought they were going to hate you. Okay? And that angered those cops. And I hear about that still.
Payne: That’s how I felt. Hickey: That’s a sad truth. But that’s what we’re having to fight for. We’re still having to fight for.
But it’s going to take a lot of work. It’s not just the cops.That’s my summary statement. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you for sticking with us. We are trying. Don’t think we aren’t.
Comment: And it’s not going to get fixed in one contract.
Hickey: No, it’s not. It’s going to be a very long road.
Continuing the questions.
Sgt. Hickey: The contract runs to the end of ’25.
EQ: people asked if there is a place where others can learn about the contract. This report should be a start.
QQ: When do you guys get your pay raise? Do you have ads for new officers?
Sgt. Hickey: The raise will start in the next couple of weeks, and we’ve got ads out. [EQ Check: tiny url: https://tinyurl.com/27umdeav]
Our new “Recruiting SUV” has been at a couple events. It does draw attention! We revamped our recruiting unit. Lt. Anderson has been getting laterals and increasing applicants. Getting 10 laterals over is huge.
QQ: There was talk about encouraging officers to live within city limits. I know we didn’t mandate it, but, is there any talk of that anymore?
Inspector Torborg: That was a law, many years ago. It’s not being talked about now. I will say this, though. I’m not a big fan of that. This is just my personal opinion. I lived in Northeast for 10 years while working at the campus. I can tell you that there’s never a break.
Officer Hickey: I’d like to speak to that too. There’s never a break. I had neighbors who didn’t see me as a person. People think [if you lived here] you’d have more empathy. But I’m going to be working in a different neighborhood, so it doesn’t matter where [I live].
Insp. Torborg: The other part of it is this: it’s changed over the years. We no longer incarcerate people for most violent crimes for any significant amount of time.
I had a nice little house in Northeast Minneapolis, but it was only a matter of time before somebody I arrested made threats to come over and shoot my house up. I was about to get married. Now I had to worry about the safety of my wife.
It’s a personal choice if officers want to live in the city or not, but you never know what kind of a situation an officer could get in, whether it’s his own fault or not. Unless you lived it, you wouldn’t know.
MN statute prohibits us from mandating a residency requirement. We are allowed to pay incentives, but I think that would likely have to be negotiated.
[EQ: See https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/415.16]
Zakhia: As someone who is more on the outside of this, a lot of people, like people of color, are marginalized. They do not feel safe when they see police officers, because of their own personal experience. [EQ Ref: the killing of Tamir Rice in 2014] A 12 year old kid who had a toy gun was killed by an officer. My brother was the same age at the time.
I do understand why as a police officer, you would not enjoy that experience of being seen that way. I think that is where a lot of people also come from.
I think it’s pretty different for white people or people who don’t experience marginalization, seeing someone who is a cop. A lot of people don’t know if you ever do experience that, or if you’re also watching them in that way. For some people, being policed is not an uncomfortable experience.
For a lot of other people, that experience is genuinely horrifying. And I think that 2020 did intensify that. I also think that 2020 gave people more confidence to express that disdain that they have built up that maybe they were not able to express before.
CM Payne: When I was working for the city, I helped design the behavioral crisis response for the city. COPE was a very big part of the conversation. Are we duplicating the work?
The big distinction was you could phone COPE, but you couldn’t request COPE services through 911. There might be a dispatcher who could pass you through, but it wasn’t trained in as a formal response. Also you wouldn’t know when they could come to you. They might come within 72 hours, as an example.
Additionally, in 2020, when everything was locked down, we had a co-responder model pilot with COPE, and two would go out at the same time. [See report: https://courtwatch2pac.com/?s=co-responder ] One of the most important things we saw was is that you should be able to just call 911 and let them figure out what services to send. That’s a core principle of behavioral crisis response.
Then: liability insurance and outside contractors.
Canopy Roots is the company that we have a single contract with. They staff the entire program. They have the vans. They have the insurance. They also have to go through the background checks, which you need to have access to our dispatching system.
This is a 10 or 20-year conversation.
STATE OF THE PRECINCT
Crime statistics for the 2nd Precinct for 28 days, ending on August 12
| NIBRS Crime Metrics-28 days | 2024 | 2023 | Prev.3 yrs |
| Assault offenses | 58 | 98 | 91 |
| Incl. Domestic.Ag.Asslt. | 7 | 9 | 8 |
| Burglary, B&E | 32 | 25 | 27 |
| Vandalism | 72 | 60 | 68 |
| Homicide, non-neg. | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Homicide, negligent | 0 | 0 | |
| Larceny theft | 158 | 102 | 77 |
| MV Theft | 72 | 51 | 71 |
| Robbery | 12 | 11 | 17 |
| Incl. car-jacking | 1 | 0 | 3 |
| Sex Offenses | 8 | 6 | 5 |
| Stolen Prop. Offences | 0 | 5 | 5 |
| Weapons law violations | 2 | 1 | 8 |
| Shots fired calls | 18 | 17 | 23 |
| Gun wound victims | 1 | 1 | 3 |
Inspector Torborg: I want to touch on a few things.
Overall, our robberies are down. We didn’t have any robberies last week, until Saturday. Then we had a couple on Saturday, unfortunately.
Our auto thefts have also been down slightly. We’ve been averaging around 25 auto thefts a week, but we had 18 last week. The suspects seem to be targeting single people on their phone or not paying attention.
Other than that, nothing major to report on.
The Basilica Block Party was held at Boom Island Park last weekend. And despite about 10,000 people attending each day, we had no major incidents. That’s a victory. National Night Out was nice, too. It’s been a good couple of weeks.
Comment: It’s fall and parents are wondering about safety near the U
Torborg: We have a late-night safety plan in Dinkytown every weekend. We have extra officers working almost every weekend night. The UMPD is also providing a presence down there.
QQ: I live at 2nd and Broadway. We would like someone to meet with our building assn. and talk about crime in the area, and what we can do to make our building safer. We have an accessible door that’s often open. We’ve had people camping in our basement.
Can someone look over our property and talk to us about safety.
Some of the people in my building think there’s crime everywhere.
CPS Ali: I’m the MPD Crime Prevention Specialist at the 2nd Pct. We can do a security assessment and a safety presentation. We can do them separately. In those safety presentations and in those security assessments, we include crime trends, crime data. It’s a complete package.
And then while I have the mic, I want to say greetings to Conan, who I know I used to work with back in the day when he was the vice president of the Audubon Neighborhood Association. It’s good to see you, my friend.
Hickey: President, President.
CPS Ali: President, my apologies.
Quast: This has been an unusual evening for 2-PAC. We’ve had a productive open discussion about common concerns. I appreciate everything everybody has contributed here. Thank you.
2nd Precinct Advisory Council 