Monitor: Minneapolis police likely to make most court-enforced changes on time
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The Minneapolis Police Department is on track to finalize or nearly finalize most of the policies with a year one revision deadline, under a court-enforced agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, according to the independent monitor group supervising the process.
As the first yearlong review period of the agreement comes to an end this month, members of the monitoring group, Effective Law Enforcement for All, held a community meeting Wednesday in northeast Minneapolis to update residents on that progress.
"A lot of the infrastructure either did not exist and had to be built from scratch, or it had to be rebuilt,” said David Douglass, who leads ELEFA. “It was like saying, okay, MPD, we want you to drive a car, but the road was not built."
The policy changes were required after a state human rights investigation initiated after the police killing of George Floyd found a pattern of discriminatory policing and excessive force.
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ELEFA says several policies will be final or near final by the end of the month, including 14 use-of-force policies and policies related to de-escalation, crisis intervention, and critical decision making. ELEFA has approved MPD’s facilities, equipment and technology plan, as well as a data systems plan, which will go into implementation next. Body worn camera review operating procedures are forecasted to be ready by July.
According to ELEFA’s first six-month progress report released in February, year one is considered a foundational phase. The next phase will focus on evaluation.
Deputy Chief Bill Murphy said one major focus, which was delayed, is finalizing field training officer policy and trainings and ensuring supervisors get adequate training. A training needs assessment released early last year found that the department had no formal supervisory training for supervisors promoted since 2022 — with some officers reporting transitioning to a leadership role without any training at all.
"They had a period of time on MPD that they didn't have a new supervisor school, which is bad,” said Murphy. “When you get promoted, you got to go to a school. You got to learn how to do it. That's a work in progress."
The cop convicted of murdering Floyd, Derek Chauvin, was a field training officer. Two of Chauvin’s trainees, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng held Floyd down as Chauvin kneeled on his back and neck for more than nine minutes.
During a Q&A portion of the meeting, one member of the audience asked how the department will avoid having another officer like Chauvin be in charge of training other officers.
Douglass pointed to beefed up policies and trainings, as well as a focus on supervision over the next year. Some in the audience pushed back, unsatisfied with that answer. Douglass also pointed to audits and body worn camera reviews as a tool for accountability.
“And when we see an officer who does the wrong thing, we’re also going to look to see, ‘did their supervisor do the things they should have done to hold them accountable?” Douglass said. “Were they monitoring to see any warning signs that an officer might be prone to do something wrong?”
Throughout the Q&A, several attendees took to the microphone to express lingering mistrust —- both of MPD and the independent monitoring team as an adequate mechanism for change. Several took issue with the team’s makeup, which includes former police officers overseeing Minneapolis police.
Douglass acknowledged the fractured faith stretched beyond the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
“So we understand the frustration, the trauma, and quite frankly, the distrust that exists in this community,” Douglass said. “All I can do is ask you to take this journey with us. That’s why we come and report to you what we’ve done, so you can hold us accountable.”
ELEFA leaders say residents can expect a report detailing work from the past six months to be available by the end of May.
One community member, Farhio Khalif, who sits on the Police Community Relations Council, said she hopes to see a turnout more reflective of the communities who have been the most impacted by police brutality, highlighting the mostly white audience. She said she’s encouraged by what she’s hearing from the team, but wants better outreach so more can get involved.
“We would like to see at your next meeting better than this, because the last three meetings that I’ve been to, I can see the same audiences attending,” Khalif said. “We need to get deep, marginalized communities, people who’ve been affected the most. The reason that you have been hired to be in the city of Minneapolis … is to figure out what the African American, Native community, and us, the immigrant Black communities, are feeling.”
The independent monitor is currently seeking a community partner to lead public engagement and is in the process of creating an implementation liaison council — which currently doesn’t have a set number of seats — to foster more community input and relations.
The next community meeting will be held in July.