Adams and Ellison on community safety
Minneapolis police Inspector Charlie Adams and Ward 5 City Councilman Jeremiah Ellison spoke at a recent town hall meeting. Photo by Azhae’la Hanson
By Sawyer Erstad, North High School
Student contributor Sawyer Erstad interviewed Minneapolis police Inspector Charlie Adams and Ward 5 City Councilman Jeremiah Ellison on issues surrounding community safety and the lack of police officers.
In 2020, the Minneapolis Police Department had 880 officers. That number dropped to 534 officers during the last two years, with less than half of those being patrol officers.
The number of patrol officers who responded to 911 calls has been reduced even further, from 600 to 250.
Adams described a department that is hemorrhaging officers by the week due to burnout.
“This summer I lost like four officers in one week because they were just tired of the job,” Adams said.
Along with the decline in police, crime has increased dramatically. Ellison attributes this to more than just mindless crime, but to inequities in vulnerable communities.
Responses are lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
How does poverty affect violence rates? Does increased poverty correlate with increased violence?
Adams: That's what's going on. When a community, especially the African American community, doesn't have the opportunity, as other communities do, and they're constantly trying to get jobs, they're charged twice as much for housing insurance. They go to a job, they're competing against one another, not against the whole pool. If that person can't get money to survive, they're gonna find a way to get money to survive. And if that's selling dope, that's what they're gonna do, right? And then this whole violence thing becomes an ego thing, because now you're jealous of the other guy, because maybe he does have a nicer car, and you're walking on foot. And, you know, it plays into that whole thing. I think if people had the opportunity to have good paying jobs, you'd see this violence go down, but also just not having a job. You have to have, you have to have good housing. You have to have clean housing. Right? Everybody wants a safe neighborhood. And so I have to agree with that.
Ellison: When people need resources, when people lack resources, they try to get them any way that they can. And sometimes the ways in which they try to achieve those resources is to harm others. I want to clarify, what is not true is that somehow people who are poor are inherently more violent. I think that the 2008 financial crash was sort of like the last big moment that we saw this, where we were on a 20-, 25-year downward trend in terms of violent crime, and then the financial crash happened. People's housing stability is completely compromised and you see that violence increase. It's not so much that the people who are poor are the ones who are out there committing crimes. Sometimes you know, opportunity crimes, people steal a car or whatever, that's different. But more often what it means is that when you're poor, you're vulnerable. So it might be the same number of people who are causing harm, but they just have more targets because they have more people who are vulnerable, more people who are on the street, more people without stable housing.
What are some steps the city has taken to address the violence?
Adams: We're gonna continue to do our jobs as police officers. It took us a while to get officers back to doing what they were
supposed to do because a lot of them are scared. They don't want to make a mistake and go to prison. So we have to mentally get them to understand that you need to go out and do your job. That's what you get paid for as long as you do it within all coordinates to the law, just being fair and being respectful, you won’t have any of those problems. And if no problems arise, and we see that you were doing what we asked you to do, and you did nothing that violated policy, then we will support you. So that's the toughest battle, getting the morale back up and having officers go out there and do what they're supposed to do.
Ellison: Yeah, for sure. When it comes to things like criminal apprehension and law enforcement, the council actually has no jurisdiction. Even though I don't have any, I still put in a lot of work to make sure I've got good relationships at the 4th Precinct to make sure that I've got good relationships within City Hall. I do my best to make sure that I can have access to the information, that I can know what's going on, that I can support people who might be victims of violent crime. That being said, Mayor Frey has been working on his government structure. Law enforcement is a huge part of that. It's a huge part of his purview. And I know that he is working on things that the council might not be involved in. For instance, inviting federal agents to do gun tracing. I know that that work is occurring. I'm not a part of that work because that's outside of my jurisdiction. I know the MPD in conjunction with federal agents have been working to get a lot of guns off of the street in the last couple of weeks. So those are all things that are happening, the council's purview is more what they would call civil in nature, right, as opposed to criminal or law enforcement.
How can public safety be improved?
Adams: We can't let an officer sit in a precinct, on the same shift for 18 years and do the same thing. That's where the job is not interesting anymore. You're doing the same thing. You'd become bitter. If I was Chief, I would make a six-year rotation. You work in a precinct, you can be there for six years, and then you'd have to go somewhere else. And I would shift all these officers all throughout the police department so they can understand there's a different world out there, right? You're not seeing the business people go into work every day. All you're doing is responding to 911 calls. So you're dealing with them, but you're not dealing with people in the daytime that will say hi to you, instead of saying f*** you. So, yeah, there's a mindset here that a lot of our police officers are traumatized. I think everybody is because we witness shootings, murders. And we have to deal with that. The average citizen doesn't deal with that. So when they deal with these homicides, and people yelling at them, because somebody's dead, calling them all kinds of names, who comes to the cop the next day and asks, ‘How are you feeling?’ Nobody. So now you're dealing with what we call epicurious trauma. And now you start to see officers with attitudes because they don't know how to unpack what they just witnessed and what they just went through.
Ellison: I think the council can be more involved in creating different responses through 911, so for example, we know through our data that police officers waste a lot of their time on calls that they have no training or understanding of, and often mental health calls, but mental health calls are just one type of call that the police probably shouldn't be responding to. There are certain kinds of domestic calls that the police don't need to be responding to. People need help. Kids need help. Couples need help. That’s one of the reasons that we worked to create a 4th 911 response. You call 911, you've got police, you've got fire, and you've got EMT. Well, now you also have mental health, right? That didn’t exist a year ago. And so incorporating mental health responses into 911 means that we get to eliminate that as a part of the police's job, which creates safety, which frees the police up to go do stuff that they should be doing. It also creates safety for community members who might be in the throes of a crisis. Instead of being screamed at or assaulted by an agent of the state, they need someone who can hear them, who can deescalate them, who can get them to a safe environment. And so by creating that, I think we're creating safety two ways for officers, for outreach, for mental health responders and for community members who maybe don't need a law enforcement response for what is in essence a mental health crisis or a behavioral health crisis.
What are some of the things you’ve seen community members doing to help?
Adams: We have various things that we're doing as a department, we've worked with Hospitality House, we got all sorts of volunteers over there. We go to Thomson Reuters and do ‘Build A Bike’, where we build 20 bikes, we bring them back to the precinct and if a kid needs a bike, we'll give him a bike. We have a group of officers to go down to Phyllis Wheatley on Wednesdays and sit down and they're dealing with the kids on discussing issues and stuff. There's a group that's called the Black Man's Project. That’s Black men and white cops, we meet once a month, we talk about issues, we go and talk to the rookie schools before they hit the streets. So there's a whole lot of stuff that we're working on with the community, and the community is also working with us. The police unity community team is basically helping our recruitment team recruit new officers. So yeah, there's a whole lot going on.
Ellison: More community members, centers, and entrepreneurs are starting programs where they want to either do youth work or connect people with jobs. I've seen residents entrepreneurs really start to engage in social enterprise and say, “how can my business be a total value add to the community? I've seen those conversations happening in those circles in ways that I've never seen before, and to that end, I tried to be supportive of those efforts.
I worked to create this fund that would allow Northside residents to buy a lot of commercial buildings in the neighborhood, because historically our commercial corridors haven't been owned by people who live in the neighborhood.
And you know, I had some colleagues who said, ‘Council member, what you're doing is well-intentioned, but there's nobody in your neighborhood who can buy these buildings, even if we help them.' And what I found was that that wasn't true. There are plenty of people in North Minneapolis who are ready to support their neighbors and who are ready to own buildings themselves. Get Northside businesses in those buildings who then employ people who live in the community.