MPD 2-PAC Meeting began at 6:41pm, 7 people in person and 11 on ZOOM.
Quast: The Feb. focus is the Minneapolis Immigrant Allies Program starting with the city ordinance which is the foundation:
CHAPTER 19. – EMPLOYEE AUTHORITY IN IMMIGRATION MATTERS (from the link, scroll down to Chapter 19)
ordinance (link)
Related docs. explaining your rights and responsibilities.
- Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota Know Your Rights page
- Find resources, guides and important forms from the Volunteer Lawyers Network
- Creating safe and supportive schools for immigrant and English learner students
- Welcoming America Preparation and Rapid Response Resource Collection
- What to do if immigration agents come to your workplace
- Workplace poster
MPD Inspector Torborg opened:
Inspector: MPD officers don’t ask about immigration status. First: We are forbidden to ask about it by city ordinance . Second: we have so many other things that we have to deal with that we don’t have time to deal with immigration status.
I know there’s been a lot of concern in the immigrant community, especially in NE MPLS. Recent immigrants are concerned that the MPD will help ICE with raids or taking people into custody.
We don’t do that.
All I know about ICE activity is there have been some cases in Minneapolis, where ICE has taken some criminal suspects into custody, but I’m not aware of any major operations in MPLS or in NE MPLS.
Now, know that if an officer from any other agency is in a situation where they need help, we would definitely go and assist to stabilize the situation and make sure nobody was injured or in danger of being injured. That’s where our assistance would end.
If you see Minneapolis officers on the scene with ICE officers, it’s because something went wrong and we had to go there to stabilize the situation. I imagine, if that happened, the ICE officers would back out fairly quickly.
I’m working with a consulate to try to spread this message. Recent immigrants aren’t afraid of MPD officers and they’re not afraid to come forward when they’re either a witness or a victim of crime. But, they’re concerned. The MPD is trying to reassure residents that [assisting ICE] is not one of the things we do. We hope the word is getting out.
Quast: Thank you.Our guest speaker is here.
City Council Rep. Elliott Payne: Hello. Apologies for running late. [Quast explained what has been covered]
Payne: My staff put out a set of resources as well. I have some “Know Your Rights” printouts . My staff has been doing some training on this topic.
Payne: The biggest question I’ve been getting relates to immigration enforcement. People are spreading false rumors. We’re being vigilant about that, to stop “fear mongers”. The Trump administration is flooding the zone with action after action after action to keep people distracted.
We don’t want people living in fear. We want people to know what their rights are. We want people to know what the role of MPD is as it relates to enforcement. The critical thing for safety is: we don’t want people to not go to MPD because they’re fearful, especially if they’re a victim of a crime. If people are fearful of going to law enforcement, they might be victimized and not get help for that. That’s why we created the “Know Your Rights” document.
We want to have accurate information out there. If you’re receiving information from the government, can you trust it? We want to balance information from Minneapolis officials with information from other organizations that might have more of an authentic connection into the communities. I have reached out to a South American consulate so we can communicate with each other.
The rumor mill has triggered negative consequences for a lot of immigrant owned businesses. They’re seeing fewer customers because people are listening to rumors. People are not shopping or eating at restaurants.
These rumors are not limited to immigration. Many executive orders are coming out right now. A lot of them are probably going to be judged unlawful orders, but the simple fact that an order has been published through the official channel of the White House might make people believe that it’s a valid order and change their behavior.
The technically correct answer: all of those [executive orders] are going to get challenged in court. They’re going to go through a legal process. On the tail end of that legal process, we’ll discover whether or not it’s a lawful or unlawful order. But that takes time.
QQ How do we educate the public about immigrants whose citizenship is “in process”?
Payne: That’s the aim of our separation ordinance. The administration is trying to revoke the legal status of folks who have a legal “in process” status.
This is outside the jurisdiction of local government. I say “separation ordinance ” on purpose because “sanctuary city” actually doesn’t have any legal meaning. We want to be clear that even when people colloquially say that we’re a sanctuary city, that doesn’t mean you’re safe.
Federal agents have the authority to enforce federal law, whether a city has ordinances on the books or not. We need clarity from the courts so that people who have legal status can feel confident in their status. But for folks whose citizenship is “in process”, I don’t want to say anything that would lead people to believe that they are safe. As long as the federal laws are on the books, and you have a federal government that wants to enforce them, they’re not safe.
Part of the reason for our separation order ordinance is certainly political and it’s a reflection of our values of creating a community that’s welcoming, but a lot of it is also practical. Our immigration system is fundamentally broken, and it needs to be reformed at the federal level.
We get into a philosophical place of: how should we, as individual American citizens, respond to unlawful orders? And who determines what’s a lawful order? Well, we have a formal judiciary process that’s supposed to come to a final determination of that. But while that’s all under appeal, how should we be responding to [those orders]? That’s something that we have to ask ourselves individually as part of our commitment as citizens.
As a City Council member, I have sworn an oath to the U.S. Constitution. I have sworn an oath to the Constitution of the State of Minnesota and to the Charter of the City of Minneapolis. We have legal processes to question and submit legal actions that can just slow this process down a little bit, legally, all within the right process.
I think that we need to be intentional and thoughtful about all of those tools. At the state level, there are even more tools than we have at the city when it comes to those protections. What will help to slow things down? To solve the problem? What if we don’t have the right tools?
That’s my question, because we can slow the process down. To me, slowing it down seems anticlimactic. I think we need to be more proactive and intensive. To be nope, nope, nope. This is not tolerated. This is not okay. We’ve dealt with this before. To slow it down, seems out of whack.
The best example of what I’m talking about is there was an executive order to revoke birthright citizenship, a protection that’s in the Constitution. Our state attorney general signed on with other states’ attorneys general to sue the federal government about that. And they got a restraining order on that executive order that paused that executive order. Other executive orders have either gotten a temporary stay or a restraining order, meaning, “This needs to go through a judicial process before you can enact this executive order”.
[The City Council] signed on to a lawsuit affiliated with some of these topics. Cities have some jurisdiction, states have some jurisdiction, while nonprofits and other organizations have been doing lawsuits.
For instance, some of the actions at the executive level are attempting to force people out of their federal jobs. The unions that represent those workers have sued the federal government, and they’re getting temporary stays as a result of that and it’s working through the courts. You have to ask: are our institutions going to be able to be resilient to all of these actions, and will the courts get us resolutions? And, if enough lawsuits pause this agenda long enough, . . .
I don’t have a lot of faith in Congress changing their perspective on this issue, but there was a bipartisan immigration bill last administration that didn’t come to a vote, but was aiming to resolve some of these broken aspects of our immigration system. The root cause [of this immigration problem] is that the immigration system isn’t functioning correctly.
There have been attempts in Congress to fix some of that. Those actions wouldn’t solve all of our immigration problems, but it was some of the most substantive reform in generations. There’s the legal course of filing lawsuits and kind of gumming up the system. Maybe some mass protests on the streets would change the attitude of Congress to come back to the table in a bipartisan way, or maybe it will slow it down in the courts long enough to get to the midterms where we can elect people who want to actually solve this problem.
Quast: City Attorney Nnamdi Okoronkwo is here also.
Okoronkwo: I know that there is a working group on inquiries about immigration status, as well as inquiries into people’s just legal status. The city doesn’t have a basis for asking those questions, but we’re going over a lot of this information with employees that touch pretty much every area of the city enterprise
There is concern about what we can and can’t do as a city regarding ICE immigration or any federal authority that’s here working in that regard. We know that several attorneys general have filed suits to slow a lot of this, because of Constitutional issues.
We are seeing some of the results of the immigration questions. We’re noticed that in domestic issues, we’re not seeing a lot of Spanish-speaking people going to jail. With any sort of domestic, response tends to be a mandatory arrest if the person is at the house when officers arrive. The numbers are down.
Payne: I can build on that. So that working group that he’s talking about, is giving a presentation to the City Council Committee of the Whole tomorrow. The presentation is posted online. It’s going to go through all of the executive orders. Our attorney’s office did some analysis on what the impact of those executive orders would be to our city. Also, I am a co-author on a resolution encouraging the city attorney to participate as amicus curiae. Basically, we give our city attorney the authority to bring forward litigation [against? executive orders that are] counter to our values. When the federal administration brings forward policy that is counter to the city’s values and we have standing, we want our attorneys to pursue that legally. Normally, you need council approval for that for each action. This resolution is basically giving the city attorney the authority blanket for the next two years to use their judgment to bring forward litigation. [contact EQ for links to the presentation]
It’s in the city’s interest and one of the things that we can do at the local level. We signed on to an amicus brief that can create some political conditions to slow the process down or even change the political climate if it grows with enough momentum. Those are the little sparks and seeds that we’re trying to start or plant here locally.
Quast: Elliott, you’ve been looking at your watch. What do you want to share with us?
Payne: I went on a ride-along on Friday night with our juvenile task force. They’re focusing on 15 or so kids, children, who are named in many car theft and carjacking cases. MPD knows who they are. The challenge is they’re like 10, 11, 12 years old. You can’t charge them as adults, they’re children, but they’re not successful at home. And their families need support.
The lieutenant I was riding with, Lt. O’Rourke, is trying to do intervention at the family level and bring in resources at the family level. We were sitting outside of one of the family’s houses, actually a couple blocks away from here, talking to the mother. As we were having this conversation, a car pulled up and all of a sudden the squad car license plate reader set off an alarm. It was a stolen car. It was probably the kid’s friend coming to pick him up.
We need to think about doing interventions that can prevent this kind of stuff from happening in the first place. How do we can partner with community organizations that have authentic connections with those kids and can provide mentorship to those kids?
This ties into the criminal justice system: Does a prosecutor have enough information to charge. Is the kid old enough to charge?Do we even have an out-of-home facility? Would you even send a 10 year old to jail? How do we make those kids be more successful?
In this case, the parent is a very engaged single mother with 3 or 4 kids. The kids and their friends engaged with [legal] social media challenges. Then, the game became “Who can steal the Kia and get chased by the police?” It’s actually terrifying.
COMMENT FROM ATTENDER (had a car stolen recently) I would just add that, it’s one thing to want attention, but these are violent kids. They were holding guns at Royal and me two weeks ago. They each had a big pistol. There’s a different level of antisocial that’s brewing.
It’s pretty, it’s pretty freaky being held up by a gun. They’re numb to that kind of stuff. My understanding is that they are so numb to the violence of certain behaviors, that they don’t even understand the repercussions of what’s going to happen to them, or what they’re doing, or the value of life.
I found that out. I was robbed by a few kids; one was a 14-year-old girl. I’m out on the sidewalk. They bull rushed her [nodding to companion]. Pointed a gun at my head for 50 seconds. I’m surprised that we stayed as calm as we did. But it crossed my mind, they could shoot her. [Details of the armed robbery] The sad thing is — these kids are numb to that stuff.
Payne: The lieutenant was sharing with me that part of what he’s doing is he’s building a relationship with the parents. He’s getting intel from the parents. He showed me one of their Snapchats. They have a little flyer for an event. They’re all going to meet somewhere. Steal Kias, and wait until the police show up. Then everybody’s going to run at the same time, because they want to get chased. That’s the thrill of it.
It’s not only that they’re numb to the violence; it’s that they have to keep ratcheting it up to feel the thrill.
Inspector Torborg: It’s frustrating from a law enforcement perspective. Officers have to talk to the victims, and to respond to these violent carjackings. I’m rarely the responding officer, but occasionally I’m out on the scene where there’s a carjacking. Sometimes I have the opportunity to talk to the victims afterwards; sometimes I just happen to know the victims, and I talk to them about it.
Our focus has been: what do we do about the juveniles? Some are very young. If you lock up a 13-year-old, 14-year-old, 15-year-old, it’s going to have negative consequences for them for the rest of their life.
What is forgotten in our current criminal justice system is public safety. While everything might be true about the suspects and the kids, the bottom line is people are having their lives threatened. And the first thing we have to do is keep people safe.
I think too often we forget about the victims. There’s all kinds of social workers and effort and everything else being placed into figuring out a productive solution to what do we do with these juvenile chronic offenders. But how much help do the victims get?
If they’re lucky, the victims get to chat with an investigator and they’ll get maybe a call from the county attorney. And they get to talk to their insurance agent later about getting their car replaced. And then that’s probably all they get.
Comment from the victim: This crime happened in the third precinct and the cops were excellent. Three young guys, just respectful, professional. I just can’t say enough about that. So I’m going to sing their praises.
Inspector Torborg: I want to thank Councilman Payne for going on a ride along and that’s his 2nd ride-along he’s done with the MPD. I’ve known many City Council members over my career. A lot of them talked about going on ride-alongs, but only a few did. So thank you, Council Member for that. “President”, I should say.
Payne: I appreciate that. I wish the bar was a little higher.
It’s important to really understand these issues. You can get into an ideological place about these topics because they’re so sensitive, but it’s important to see it firsthand. Then you see that there are so many gaps.
Payne: We get a lot of “What are you doing about crime?” calls. Actually, our role is limited — We approve the police budget and the police contract.
I would like to be able to give eye witness reports on what the failures in our system are. With that, I could talk about filling the gaps, whether that’s advocating for victim services and resources, advocating for more out of home placements for young people or other gaps.
We’re not going to put juveniles in jail, but they don’t have the support they need at home. They may need separate facilities, but a related topic is that we don’t have enough facilities for mental health. So how do we advocate for those things?
[conversation on what consequences juveniles could face for their misbehavior]
Quast to Payne: Your time is limited. Let’s spend time on what you want to cover.
Payne: The ride-along was the number one thing I wanted to talk about here because it just revealed a lot of the realities. It was grounding. I think grounding before we approach policy in reality, is critically important. I wanted to share with this group that this was a profound experience I had.
QUESTION: After everything that we’ve talked about, how can all of us help all the issues that we’ve talked about?
Payne My real hope is that we begin having these more nuanced conversations on the topic of safety. I think that we all went through something traumatic in this city in the last few years. And that has really activated our more primal nature. What would be very helpful is for us to really think about how we can move forward together in a way that is supportive of solutions, rather than inflammatory, ideologically, pointing fingers. The fact that you’ve all decided to volunteer to be in this setting says something about your commitment to this work. That is like above and beyond most civic engagement. And I think that you have access to networks that I don’t have access to. I’m a representative of city government, and you are also a representative of your neighborhood.
If you and your networks can start fostering a nuanced and collaborative approach to this topic, that would be a start.
CM Payne’s final words at PAC is the perfect introduction to the next topic: What can we neighbors do to recreate the structures that support community safety.
That’s something we’re going to be working on over the next six months or year.
BLOCK CLUBS
Neighborhood Safety is one of the things that COVID destroyed for us. The Second Precinct used to have the strongest collection of block clubs in the city.
We have to start reaching across the street. Keep your eyes open and talk to neighbors. Plan an agenda. Send one representative to a place like this. Send another to city council hearings.
But it can’t be just Southeast Minneapolis, which actually still has a few block clubs. It has to be Block Clubs in neighborhoods all across the Precinct. You start out by getting to know the people on either side of you and then across the street.
This is something that will be happening here, starting here.
I have already been approached by somebody, one person remembered that the 4th Precinct used to have the strongest block clubs in the city. Two other people from the 3rd Precinct contacted me also. 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Precincts are about the way it’s going to go.
This is something that can be built up in the 2nd Precinct, for sure, over the next year. So, get started. It really doesn’t take a lot of money. We don’t need it. It takes meeting people across the fence, offering a hand and accepting a grin. (It’s also nice to have an occasional potluck in somebody’s garage, though.)
The Southeast Como Improvement Association started out in living rooms, back yards, and garages. That is how it happens. We had it and we have to go back to that. If we wait for the city to “do something”, we lose. Anyway, that funding was cut before covid.
Future meetings will be addressing the topic.
STATE OF THE PRECINCT
| NIBRS Crime statistics 2025 2024 3 yr. Ave | |||
| Assault | 79 | 68 | 65 |
| Incl. Dom. Ag. Aslt. | 7 | 11 | 9 |
| B&E | 14 | 79 | 63 |
| Homicide negl. | 0 | 0 | |
| Homicide non-neg | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Larceny | 145 | 175 | 174 |
| MV Theft | 41 | 75 | 74 |
| Robbery | 10 | 16 | 14 |
| Incl. car jacking | 3 | 2 | 4 |
| Sex offenses | 7 | 17 | 8 |
| Stolen property | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| Weap. Law Viol. | 7 | 4 | 2 |
| Gun Wound Vics. | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Shots fired calls | 18 | 22 | 15 |
Inspector Torborg: Most of the crimes were trending down. We had an uptick in car jackings — we had three, two of them occurred last week: one on Thursday and one on Friday.
On Saturday night, we had a shooting, or, you could call it an assault or a robbery. It was in on 6th Avenue SE on Saturday night, at a party. An attempted robbery went bad. The victim didn’t have any money to hand over, and the suspect reportedly fired a shot at the victim. The victim was just grazed by the bullet and didn’t go to the hospital. He was treated at the scene and then released.
It was pretty concerning that we had three violent crimes in the second precinct in three days, because usually that doesn’t happen for us. Hopefully that’s just a blip on the map.
The second carjacking was on Friday; the suspects were all apprehended. I think it got some media coverage. The vehicle was spotted in North Minneapolis and tracked until the occupants fled from the car and hid in a garage. All the six suspects were taken into custody. They are all known to us. They are all involved in other crimes. So at least, you know we got them in custody.
They’re juveniles though, so who knows what’s gonna happen to them. At least we had an arrest in that case though.
[City Attorney] Okoronkwo has been putting in a ton of work on Josh Poplowski. We’ve arrested him him for gross misdemeanor trespassing, for repeated trespassing offenses. But then he was also arrested with some narcotics. We’re trying to get him to a plea deal so he’s held at the workhouse for 364 days, [over to City Attorney Okoronkwo]
Okoronkwo Thank you, Inspector.
Josh Poplowski is one of the frequent flyers in the second precinct at U of M. His activity over the years has been ramping up. He’s had an adult probation officer for the last couple of years, Ron Cunningham, who was excellent at working with him and kind of keeping him on the straight and narrow. Josh tends to frequent the West Bank area and U of M, as well as Dinkytown, because there’s a lot of commerce there.
Our office and the county attorney have been working to try and get him considerable time because he has a lot of cases. Some of the cases we don’t charge, but the county has, so they get to pick and choose what they want to go forward with. He’s actually a hard guy to actually go to court with. (Just before I joined this call, I realized he’s out of jail again.)
He has a court appearance tomorrow, and he also has a lot of conditions on him, one of which is that he’s not supposed to be in Dinkytown at all. I’ve been successful at convincing a judge that a geographic restriction is probably the best thing we can do with him right now; with that in place, we can get him into programming. I would say he’s probably got about 25 cases, 12 of which we’ve charged very recently.
The goal is to get him committed so that he can get some help and stop stealing and causing problems at a lot of the area businesses in Dinkytown and Stadium Village.
He also has a Probation Officer now. That P.O. is new to the game, but I’m communicating with him regularly so that he can get up to speed with Josh. Hopefully we can get better handles. Josh is one of the people that I work with who has mental health challenges.
He doesn’t do anything serious enough that they actually can hold him for very long, unfortunately.
The sheer quantity, though! He’s one of four people I have to chase around the Precinct any given week. I think he admits to having an addiction problem. He’s frequently arrested with meth.
I think everyone’s hope is that we can keep him in custody long enough that he gets sober and maybe get some help for his addiction and some help for his mental health. He’s living a miserable existence. He’s creating misery for all the people who work in the businesses that he’s constantly stealing from. He just needs some help. It’s clear he isn’t able to help himself.
Quast: For those of you that don’t know, Josh has been on the 2-PAC agenda for about 15 years. Recently he started circling the University Lutheran Church of Hope (ULCH), and the Administrator contacted me, asking for help.
ULCH is an active church but is also home to P.E.A.C.E., a special high school for people in recovery. Mr. Obrestad was spending too much time warning Josh off the property and Josh was seen using drugs on the property. Then some of Josh’s friends started joining him on the church campus. I hope that 2-PAC has done a little more to keep Josh in the spotlight.
There was one other event, Inspector. Someone asked why we had helicopters, lots of squads, streets blocked off recently.
Torborg: Were they referring to Saturday night? We had a good burglary call. The crime was in progress. A couple of suspects were burglarizing in an apartment building, but when they left, the apartment manager followed them.
Squads got into place and did a felony stop. They took the two suspects into custody. Between UM PD and MPD, it was a pretty large police presence. Because it was in Dinkytown, a bunch of the late night safety plan officers were working too. Also the State Patrol is pretty good about having a helicopter above Minneapolis on weekends.
Quast: Well, that answers that question.
One other: If the State or cities like Minneapolis at some time receive orders, like an executive order, to go beyond what the law is right now, would you care to speculate the action?
Torborg: There hasn’t been such a mandate, but I think there’d be such an outcry from the public and our elected officials that it wouldn’t happen or there’d be immediate legal action to get an injunction.
But the fact of the matter is, with the resources we have now, even if we were mandated to track down undocumented immigrants, I don’t know where we’d get the resources to search for them, to be honest.
We have enough on our plate, just answering 911 calls and trying to do a little proactive police work. We don’t have the bandwidth to deal with immigration issues or be worrying about somebody’s immigration status.
Another 2nd PCT update: I can tell you that the Second Precinct construction project is done and we will have a community meeting room we can use. We’re still probably two months away from using it. They call it a team room. It’s wired to have meetings that can be broadcast on media. Sooner or later, we should have that.
QUAST That presumes we’ll have enough staff in the to watch the doors.
Torborg: That’s true. That’s a bit of a problem.
Quast: Thank you, Inspector, for being here, and thank you for your answers and your clarity.
and,
Thank you all for joining us here. MEETING END.
Emilie Quast, Member, MPD Second Precinct Advisory Council (2-PAC)
2nd Precinct Advisory Council 