Dear Mayor Frey and Council Members,
We’re on a merry-go-round. A police officer kills someone in circumstances where many believe it could have been avoided, leading to protests calling for officers to be fired and others to resign, followed by prosecutions, huge civil settlements, and maybe a change in a police policy — sometimes a trivial change. And then it happens again, and the routine continues. Round and round we go.
Nowhere in this recurring process do official bodies ever publicly discuss what lessons were learned from any of these killings. In Minneapolis this has never happened. Police Department after-action reviews are secret; civil settlements are discussed in secret; criminal trials include only very limited evidence. So we never learn. We just keep going round and round — maybe not so merrily, but we never stop the merry-go-round and seriously ask: What have we learned?
Yours,
Chuck Turchick
Ward 6
