[Mpls] Open Season

[Chris L Beckwith]

Mark Anderson wrote: > Excellent post, Michael.  I concur with your last sentence particularly. > Mpls cops are definitely better than LA or Chicago cops.  Some of the posts > here have said how bad Mpls cops are compared to other cities.  Where are > these paradises where police can disarm crazy people with no loss of life? > Name some cities.  Actually, to answer my own question, St. Paul seems to > have a little more mellow cops.  But that may be because it is simply a > little less rough over there - it's a more mellow city all around. Is this a subjective assessment? By and large, I suppose it is easy to assess the quality of a specific cop by loking at his/her record, however, assessing a particular police culture within a town, city or state is somewhat different.  One can look for general items like allegations or evidence of corruption, scandal, or brutality, but I know of no such published index (though it may well exist). To ask this question - how do we assess the quality of our cops - There are two principal points of view, that from the inside and the other, from the outside. From the inside, one interesting indication, though I've seen no data on this for Minneapolis, is the quotient of turnover within the police ranks - in short, what's the burnout factor? What numbers go on to make police work a life-long career versus those that don't?  From the outside , the general view of police within a given area is based mostly on emotion, experience, and status. The view of a member of an  inner city minority group may be (in fact, probably will be) vastly different than that, say, of upper class white banking executive. I dare say it would not be difficult to randomly select 20 different citizens within the city of Minneapolis, put them in a room, and get vastly polarized opinions on all sorts of questions about the police. In short, generalities about the police mean nothing unless a slew of background variable are taken into account. As usual, If "perception" is the question, "whose?" is the answer. Chris Beckwith Ward 6