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My assessment and feelings about Olson aren't based
on personal experience with the department. My few limited interactions have
been okay. Administrative has been responsive to my journalistic inquiries, and
beat cops okay. But I'm a white professional.
It's more about accountability, and a lack of
leadership that has done little or nothing to bring the department and the
community together. If I, as a white professional, feel queasy about the
department and its tactics, what do the city's minority residents feel like?
I wrote last year about the mental health system,
and the folks who died as a result of police shootings. Admittedly, those
shooting had root in a mental health system that is dysfunctional. And to it's
credit, the department did institute some programs to improve its response to
mental health crises. But the Mpls department's response was too late for Barbara Schneider and Albert Sanders, good
citizens killed because they were mentally ill.
And it wasn't as if the problem or ways to fix
it were unknown. Other communities had implemented similar crisis response
team strategies much earlier. Minneapolis could have been proactive, not
reactive, but it would have taken leadership.
During that time, I heard many other stories of
people brutalized at the hands of our department. Some were doing bad things at
the time. And I know that policing is a tough job, and I give street officers
lots of credit.
But I strongly believe we have other ways to
respond, and that our police department has a responsibility to protect it's
most vulnerable citizens, and even some of its worst.
I also believe when they fail to do so, they should
acknowledge that failure. Olson did no community outreach after those shooting.
He was like a blank wall. Impassive, unresponsive. Protecting his department,
not his community.
He has never expressed -- to my knowledge-- a
desire to make this department a model for serving its citizens, all
of its citizens. Crime reduction programs like CODEFOR are one
strategy for policing. And while they may reduce crime, they don't build
community.
Then there were the protests. The beating of the
bicyclist. The assault on Sister's Camelot folks. The chaining off of the
Nicolet Mall. And I only returned to live in this city two years ago.
This is like a department waging war on its
citizens, not one committed to protecting and serving them.
There, my two cents and a bit more.
Trout Lowen
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- [Mpls] Chief Olson timothy connolly
- J. Trout Lowen
