August 11th at 6.36. 2-PAC had 13 attenders, 6 in person and 7 by ZOOM.
Quast: Writing this report up, reminded me that 2-PAC has been following Social Welfare and Support services for a long time. Check the link on 2nd Precinct Advisory Council home page. In the search box on the right side of the screen, type in “Criminal Justice” for a first search. Next, put “Leah Kaiser” in the box.
2-PAC followed up with presentations on “embedded social worker”, and the several city services offered at the “1800 Chicago” building. Clearly the move was toward social services to prevent issues, rather than criminal charges after the fact. While Covid disrupted the progressive work a bit, the idea never faltered. When I read that a new person had picked up the push for stronger social connections, it looked like Mpls is getting back on track . Here’s some of what I read about Ms Harrington: https://tinyurl.com/mvhdn5ph Fox News, KARE 11, the S’Trib and more, so clearly we need to invite her to 2-PAC.
Harrington: My name is Amanda Harrington. I am the new director of the Neighborhood Safety Dept. with the city of Minneapolis. I am a social worker and an attorney. I’ve spent most of my career working for organizations in Minneapolis. I spent 10 years with Mpls. Public Schools, as a kids’ therapist, primarily in a child development center. While I was still working there, I decided to get a law degree. I then worked for the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, doing child protection cases. Next, I ran H.C’s Truancy Program for a few years before Minneapolis stole me away.
In Minneapolis, I was the first Director of Community Safety Design and Implementation, which meant that I was following the “Safe and Thriving Communities” report on Minneapolis, issued by Harvard University. [EQ see https://tinyurl.com/4j3cn9s7 for the full report] The idea is to create a more collaborative ecosystem and stop having different organizations working in silos, which is what we have had for a long time in Minneapolis. I see the police doing a lot of really good work with different organizations, but in general, the system isn’t built to let them work together. For the past year and a half, I’ve been trying to get people to collaborate, to communicate more, to be more transparent to the community.This May of this year, I was tapped to take over running the Neighborhood Safety Dept. which is what I want to explain to you.
Brief history: In 2022, Minneapolis reorganized the City Government structure. Among other changes, they moved to a “strong mayor” structure. They also created the Office of Community Safety, currently led by Commissioner Barnett. The OCS includes
- 911,
- Emergency Management,
- Fire Department,
- Neighborhood Safety,
- Police Dept.
The Neighborhood Safety Dept. used to be part of the Health Dept., and was called the Office of Violence Prevention, but the work is the same as what we’re doing now.We use the public health approach to help reduce the impact of violence in our communities. Professionals in this dept. think about violence response services on three levels.
Primary services, or Violence Prevention – the first and largest response. Services that are focused on individuals and families to prevent escalation. Something has happened and we want to keep it from getting worse.
Secondary Prevention Services: Response – Services that are focused on individuals and families to prevent escalation. Something has happened and we want to keep it from getting worse.
Tertiary Services: Restoration – The smallest group of people will need “focused interventions for folks who have already been impacted by violence”.
This is the framework that came from the Safe and Thriving Communities Report and the design and implementation work.It’s really building that community safety ecosystem. So what is this ecosystem?
It’s network of organizations, services, and programs.The idea is that no one of us can solve all of the problems of violence by ourselves. Instead, it’s going to take all of us, all the government partners, businesses, nonprofits, individuals — all working together on crime and violence, but really also addressing those underlying issues that cause crime and violence.
In neighborhood safety, there are three buckets of work.
Primary Prevention services. We contract with community organizations to do violence prevention. In Minneapolis, people also call them “Violence Interrupters”, meaning Group or Gang Violence Intervention. These are people who are gang affiliated, or perhaps not part of official gangs, are in cliques or groups. Then YGBI is Youth Group Violence Intervention. We have services to help people get out of gangs or groups if they’re in already. Or, if people are at risk of getting involved with a group, we try to prevent them from continuing or going deeper into that lifestyle. One of the services we have is “Community Safety Ambassadors”. We’re piloting that along Lake Street and Franklin Avenue. The Ambassadors are a presence in the neighborhood so people can see that people care about the neighborhood. Ambassadors are also reporting graffiti so we get more reports into the system. They check in with business owners, and also help some of the people who are unhoused in the area.
“Next Step” includes Hospital-based intervention and Community based intervention,
Hospital-based intervention starts with anyone who needs treatment in a hospital. So anybody who needs that level of care is talked to by somebody from Next Step. They interact with the victim and their family to help get them services to prevent retaliation. We can’t prevent the violence from happening, but we can have services that stop it from getting worse or stop the next step of the violence.
We also have Community Champions, a program where we train organizations and individuals in the community how to do violence prevention. This isn’t just the work of the city. People can take that training and run with it in their own communities and with their own organizations.
The Youth Connection Center is a collaboration between Hennepin County and Minneapolis Public Schools since the 90s, I think. Originally, this was aimed at young people who were out past curfew or kids who were truant from school. Now, it’s more complicated than that. It might be kids who are breaking into cars or who get caught for some of low-level offenses.The police can bring them to the Youth Connection Center, which can offer them services and give them a safe place to stay. That’s as much as we have in the prevention category right now. We don’t currently have any services in the secondary response bucket.
The third level is Restoration or Trauma Response We have 12 contracts to respond to folks in the community when something has happened. They do a lot of different services because not every community needs the same thing, but they offer things like healing circles, mentorship, reading support and more.
They’re all really different, but they’re intended to help people who are victims of crime. Some of them are for anybody in the North Side, for example. Some are open to specific people who are at risk or who have been victims of human trafficking or domestic violence. One is our Blueprint-Approved Institute.
We’ve been doing some capacity building with small or new organizations that would like to start doing work in the violence prevention space, but maybe they don’t understand how to get a business started or how to contract with the city. We have individuals who can train them how to do things like submit an invoice, manage your budget, track data. Sometimes it’s as simple as, “I want to put on an event, but I don’t know how to get printing done.” They’ll have people network and get to know each other. Those are kind of an overview of the services that we provide currently.
I want to let you know where I’m hoping to go with the organization. It existed before I came, and when the new government structure came, the department was really in upheaval and time of change. It’s been a department in flux since 2022, because that’s when it was taken out of the Health Dept.
Now that I’m here, I’d like to continue having services be based on data. We need to look at crime data and at other data.That’s how we should be determining where we’re putting services and who we’re contracting with in the community. It shouldn’t just be which city council member asks for it or which neighbor makes the most phone calls. Our response should really be based on concrete data.
I want to increase transparency: updating our web pages, putting out dashboards so people can see the effectiveness of the services that we’re contracting. None of that should be a secret.
I want to increase collaboration, with police, with Hennepin County. We shouldn’t be duplicating efforts with other governmental agencies, but we should be filling in the gaps for each other. That means agencies have to be talking to each other more regularly.
I want to increase communication in general. Y’all shouldn’t have to wonder what Neighborhood Safety does, because we should be doing a better job of telling people what we do. Part of that has been working with our communications team to tell the stories about the services that we’re providing as well. We’re going to be doing in-depth stories with the violence interrupters, with folks from the Community Safety Ambassadors Program, so people get a better idea of what these services are, just in case they haven’t encountered them in their neighborhood.
If you want more information, go to our web pages.We are slowly but surely updating all of our web pages. There’s also a newsletter through GovDelivery so you can sign up to get monthly updates from our department as well. So it’s a very long email or web page address. [ https://tinyurl.com/4849k3zx]
And I’m happy to share this presentation with people who want to take a look at it but can’t capture it quickly on the screen. Questions?
Question: I have one question that has to do with the services page you showed. About 19 to 21 neighborhoods now have safety walking groups. I’m wondering if that fits into your format. That’s been started and maintained by Aileen Johnson. I think it’s 19 to 21 neighborhoods have volunteers that at least one night a week walk through the neighborhood. In our neighborhood, we even pick up trash along the way.We all wear bright orange ugly shirts.
Harrington: I have seen some folks with bright orange shirts at the MSTAT meetings. That’s not within the scope of the Neighborhood Safety Department because what we’re doing is really contracting with organizations for that work. What you’re talking about is really part of that safety ecosystem. It can’t just be organizations that are paid to do the work. It also has to be people that care about their communities and come out and walk, block clubs, walking groups, whatever you want to call them, and all of us working together.
That’s part of “How do we share more information?” Walking groups see things and hear things. How do we make sure that they can share that information with an organization to do violence prevention or trauma response? We need all of those groups talking together.
Comment from Smith: It looks like you’re really revitalizing the effort in a very informed way. Thanks for the presentation. At the top of your list of what’s next was database decision-making or evidence-based, I’ve forgotten which. I’m guessing that there are more worthwhile things to do than there are resources. I’m wondering if you’re using processes like a process I taught in transportation called benefit-cost analysis, where you look at what are the benefits of an intervention versus the cost and try to maximize that ratio. It’s one of many ways of trying to allocate scarce resources to many problems.
Harrington: It’s a double-edged sword. One of the challenges about coming in three months ago is I haven’t had the opportunity to change a lot of things yet because I walked into a lot of contracts that were already in place or were just about to be executed. It’s going to take a while to get to the point of being able to renew and shift some of that.
The nice thing is before I came, they hired some really good data folks, so we are collecting more data from these community organizations than we ever had before, which is going to actually allow us to do some of those cost-benefit analysis that you’re talking about. I’m preparing a presentation for the city council next week to talk more about the community trauma response organizations because we’re amending those contracts. One of the things that I was able to provide in the presentation this time, was to talk about how many people can we serve per dollar invested. That’s not something that we’ve ever actually been able to report on before, so we’re getting there.
Quast: I have to interject that when I asked Amanda to come tonight, she protested that she’d only been on the job for a few months and didn’t know as much as she wanted to know in order to present, and I pointed out that that means we’re all starting in the same space. So we’ll be inviting her back as she develops her programs the way she wants them done and gives us something to look forward to.
Question Okay, I’ve got two questions here on the floor. Toward the beginning you showed the pyramid. In the middle there was something about families, does that include domestic violence?
Harrington: I just pulled up that slide so I can refresh my memory.What it said on that slide was “programs focused on individuals and families in need to prevent escalation”. That part of the pyramid was talking about violence or trauma has already happened, but how do we not allow it to get worse?
So yeah, I think domestic violence could go in there, but each situation is different. But a domestic violence survivor might also fall under the tertiary or restoration category, because they’re out of the domestic violence situation, and now we’re just trying to get them help so that they’re set in the future. Maybe if you look at a two-generation model, their kids don’t repeat something that they saw in the home. There are some people who are living in an active domestic violence situation that I would put right in the middle of that triangle, and how do we keep it from happening again? How do we keep that next physical attack from happening to that person and get them to a safe place?
QQ I was wondering if there was anything in the preventive category that you can do.
Harrington: There are some organizations that do that. There’s one organization that does empowerment classes for women and young ladies, and so I would consider that as something that could be preventative. It’s one of the things as we look at. We have a whole pool of violence prevention contracts that we can tap into, but we don’t necessarily. We’re calling it a master contract, so we have 30 organizations on standby that we could use if something bubbles up. Some of those organizations do a variety of things that are supposed to be more in that preventative category.
My name is Cassidy. I actually retired from the city of Minneapolis a couple of years ago. I worked for Minneapolis Fire for quite a long time, and one of the things I did while I was with Fire is I ran the Youth Fire Setter Intervention Program, which meant working with kids and families or families of kids who have set fires. As you probably know, one of the reasons or a big reason that a child or young person might set a fire is because of trauma. It’s just a reaction to trauma.
There was a study where they interviewed a whole bunch of young men, I think mostly in communities of color, if I remember right. The finding was that a lot of young black men, especially from lower income families and neighborhoods, don’t envision a life for themselves after age 30. That lack of hope also fuels the fire of violence, because if you don’t see a future for yourself, it’s okay. Who cares? Just do what you want, right?
My question is what has been found effective to give people hope where they see no future for themselves? I think that element of hope is like a mitigation strategy when it comes to violence prevention, violence reduction. What I see in the news, what I see on social media, what I see in my own neighborhood is youth that are doing a lot of things, carjacking, smashing windows, or other types of things. I’m just wondering, regarding hope.
Harrington: I totally agree with you. When I was working in the schools, we would see that a lot — that loss of hope. It’s something that I see a lot with violence prevention programs. A lot of them target particularly African American young men, because the statistics show exactly what you’re talking about.
There’s no one way that works because, they’re not a monolith. I’ve seen some organizations that give them something else to do, like sports, to give them something else to fill their time, so they don’t have idle hands. I’ve seen other organizations that we contract with that do entrepreneur or business training. They teach them how to turn skills that in some cases could be used for criminal activities and turn those skills into a business model that’s productive for society. Other folks are doing the mentoring model where you kind of see it to be it. They’re introduced to successful men with backgrounds like theirs, and they can see, “Oh, you came from my neighborhood. I could actually be with you and or be you someday.”
Quast: I’m going to interject one thing here. We’ve had some stunning presentations about cops who just love being with kids. It doesn’t seem to be as organized as you are talking about. Correct me when I go wrong, will you please? The youth interruption team has presented here, and they are very definitely singling out people, young people who don’t have a lot of resources, who don’t have a lot of plans.They are making sure that the kids know somebody cares about them, knows about them, will take care of them, will take them to a sports event and pick them up afterwards will be arranged, will be safe. It’s not an organized program really, is it?
Inspector Torborg: Are you talking about Lieutenant Kelly’s, the curfew task force? It’s organized within the juvenile unit, right. It’s basically a response they put together to the surge in juvenile crime we’re having, and it seems to be fairly effective. In an ideal world, we’d have a whole unit set up for that, or maybe expanding the police athletic league or something like that. But we’re just doing the best we can with what we have to work with.
Comment: What I’m suggesting here is that there may be some resources that Amanda has no direct channel to finding out about.The ones that I’ve heard about are actually happening in the MPD. Maybe they’re unofficial programs, or semi-unofficial.
Harrington: Inspector Kelly and I have actually talked about this to see if there’s some way for us to collaborate. And there’s definitely interest on both of our sides. One of the benefits of working with community organizations is you can sometimes have increased trust from the community. One of the challenges is you’re not as nimble, because you have to work within the bounds of a contract that has very specific terms. If we’re going to change some of the terms, like you have to take referrals from these folks, you’re going to do this work and go out with police at this time, then we have to amend contracts, which is not easy or quick.
Inspector Torborg had to correct a misunderstanding about a successful youth intervention program operated by the MPD.
Torborg continued, Overall, our violent crime is down between 20 and 30 percent year to date. I think a lot of that has to do with the work of the juvenile unit and this program Lieutenant Kelly put together. I think that’s a major factor in that. That’s just my personal opinion, but I think they’re pretty effective. We still have some problems with youth crime, but I think it’s had an impact.
Quast:I was just blowing a horn because I thought it was an answer, really. There’s more work to be done, though.
Are there any other questions? I’m hoping that Amanda will please, when you start getting milestones, come back and tell us what they are, please?
Harrington: I would be happy to. Thanks for having me.
2nd Precinct Advisory Council 