The following is a recent letter from Chuck Turchick to the Minneapolis City Council President, Andrea Jenkins:
Dear Council President Jenkins,
I am so, so far behind in my watching videos of Council committee meetings that just now I have finally seen the Policy and Government Oversight Committee meeting of February 7, 2022. That was the meeting held right after the killing of Amir Locke, and included presentations from and/or discussions with the St. Thomas Law School no-knock project people, three attorneys, and Mayor Frey.
A couple of people had told me that you mentioned me in this meeting, but still, I didn’t get around to watching it until now. Thank you for acknowledging my efforts to get the Council — especially, the Public Safety Committee — to have some discussions about what lessons have been learned from previous MPD officer-involved killings.
I agree with your comment about this being a first step in that process. But, as you might expect, given my contrarian nature, I also have reservations about this first step. I was encouraged that five days after the killing of Amir, a Council committee was already beginning to discuss issues raised by that incident. The ready availability of the St. Thomas Law School project and the attorneys involved in the Breonna Taylor case helped make that discussion more effective. On the other hand, though, this discussion was so close to the incident that it surely was not yet ripe for a full-blown lessons-learned discussion. And the committee clearly didn’t want to get into any specifics of that recent incident.
One thing that I wish someone had asked about was the comparison that Sarah Murtada had made to the St. Paul Police Department, which hasn’t used no-knock warrants at all since 2016, while the MPD has used hundreds of them in that time period. Delving into why that was the case might help reveal something about the culture of the MPD, a topic sometimes mentioned — for example, in the MDHR report — but one that is very difficult to define in specific terms. I note also that at least one of the questions that Judge Quaintance relayed from the jurors in the Mohamed Noor trial gets at that culture issue as well.
I do renew my request that the Council initiate lessons-learned discussions about each of the several specific cases in which large civil settlements were paid out after MPD officer-involved killings. Having a discussion about no-knock warrants five days after a no-knock raid resulted in someone being killed is certainly, as you said, a step in the right direction. But because specific details could not be discussed, it almost seems like a reflex action that can only deal with the most glaring issue, i.e., no-knock warrants, rather than trying to figure out if there is something more fundamental that we need to know about what underlies that glaring issue. Of course, both are needed, but it may well be that the no-knock warrants issue is only a symptom, while addressing the latter issue might lead to more effective change.
Keep on truckin’.
Yours,
Chuck Turchick
Ward 6
P.S. Maybe you know this, but the issue of MPD no-knock warrants was raised in a public comment to the PCOC six or seven years ago. It was pointed out in that comment that Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow had specifically mentioned the MPD regarding no-knock warrants. On page 74 of her book, she wrote this in a paragraph about the increasing use of SWAT teams in the 1980s and 1990s: “In the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, for example, its SWAT team was deployed on no-knock warrants thirty-five times in 1986, but in 1996 that same team was deployed for drug raids more than seven hundred times.”
