Community policing

The first home I could to afford to buy was a real fixer-upper. I was working in Minneapolis at the time and a woman I worked with was becoming an empty nester and was offering her home for sale for $36,000. My boss at work also owned the property I had been renting and he was a great boss but not a great landlord. So my husband and I bought the home and got to work on the many repairs needed.

There are over 80 distinct neighborhoods in the City of Minneapolis, most have associations that help the people and businesses within their boundaries. Not long after moving in I got involved in ours. One of our committees was called the Safety Committee. Made up of neighborhood volunteers, they worked with others in the community to identify areas of concerns. Back then the City’s police had a community policing program. Officers were assigned to certain neighborhoods and our came to our monthly Safety meetings. We talked about problems within the neighborhood, properties where there was suspicious activity, or people with mental illness that we wanted the police to be aware of.

The building right next door to my home was an unattractive four-plex. Poorly designed apartments, it was hard for the investor who bought the building to find good tenants, so he would rent to anybody. Some were down on their luck families, others were bad tenants who no one else would rent to. Occasionally this would include drug dealers. My husband was in a bowling league and was away from home when I heard an argument on the street in front of our home. I carefully looked out the window just in time to see a man raising his arm with a gun in his hand shooting at a car that was speeding away. I called the police. I knew and trusted them. Another night my husband came home after his bowling league and told me that the police had the neighbor house surrounded. Bye-bye drug dealers. Working with the police and the our city councilwoman, the investors gave up on the building and it was torn down, replaced with a single family home by Habitat for Humanity.

Not long afterward the City had named a new chief of police. The new chief decided to change from community policing to a program called Rapid Response. They no longer met with the local neighborhood representatives. They policed from inside a cruiser and only showed up after a 911 call or to pull people over in their cars. The relationships so carefully built over the years faded away.

By this time I had gotten a new job through with a domestic violence prevention program in Bloomington. We usually got our referrals from local police departments who had been called to the homes due to domestic violence. They hated these calls and were happy to work with us to get help and counselling for the victims. We had shelters, transitional housing, support groups and advocates who went to criminal court hearings with the clients. We helped write Orders for Protection or Harassment Restraining Orders and support the client through the court proceedings. Teenagers were sometimes the perpetrators and my position was funded by the Violence Against Women Act to work with the families and juvenile courts. Many of these children had mental health issues that had not been diagnosed or treated. I encouraged families who had mentally ill children to meet with their local police departments so that they could proactively build a relationship in case the police had to be called to the home in the future.

I few years later, on a chilly November evening we had a fire in my home accidentally started by my teen-aged daughter who fell asleep with a lit candle. She knew I didn’t allow candles, so hid it next to her bed. She fell asleep and woke up to her bed on fire. Fortunately, no one was hurt. We had to move out of the home for three months so the home could be partially gutted and renovated. My father was a real estate broker and had a listing in Edina that hadn’t sold. The owners who had already moved out of state agreed to rent it to us.

My husband drove an old Dodge Caravan. When the vehicle got above 55 miles per hour it would start shaking. Did I mention that my husband is African-American? Coming home from work along the Crosstown highway, cars speeding past him, he was pulled over by the Edina Police, told he was speeding. He wasn’t. The officer checked my husband’s drivers license which still had our Minneapolis address. They asked him where he was going. He explained that he was on his way home to our temporary residence in Edina. The police let him go, but then followed all the way to the house. When my husband used the garage door opener to pull into the garage, the police car turned around and left. Apparently he didn’t look like he belonged there.

Fast forward a few years. My children had graduated and moved out of our home. My husband and I were now empty nesters. We decided to put our home on the market and move to a quieter place. We had a boat and wanted to live closer to area lakes. We fell in love with Delano after visiting for the 4th of July celebration. We had enough equity in the home we were selling after 17 years of fixing it up to put a nice down payment on a new home. Not long after moving to Delano, we were coming home around 10:00 pm. My husband was driving. We happened to pass in front of a Wright County Sheriff’s car coming out of one of the nearby developments. The car pulled in behind us and followed us for about a mile. Just when we were getting ready to turn in to our neighborhood at Marsh Ridge, the deputy pulled us over. I was surprised because we hadn’t been speeding, and could not figure out why we were getting pulled over. The deputy asked my husband for his license and insurance card. He said that the light over our license plate was dim. Really? I’ve since been told that it is not hard to find a reason to pull someone over. Anyway, while looking at my husband’s license with our Delano address, he asked my husband where he lived. My husband pointed to the neighborhood we were about to turn in to and said, “Right there”. The deputy went back to his car, ran the license, of course came up with no warrants or other issues, so returned to our car, gave my husband back his license and insurance card, and bade us good night. The officer was not unkind or disrespectful, but the message was clear. My husband didn’t LOOK like he belonged here. I know policing can be dangerous and the deputies are wary any time they go into an unknown situation. If you want to understand the stress on a black person during these stops, please watch the new PBS documentary called Driving While Black. Because of the fear in both the law enforcement and the person getting pulled over, the stops do not always end well.

Policing first came to be in this country in the form of slave patrols. They were out to catch, beat and return escaped slaves. As some slaves made it all the way to the north, and the north wanted to attract money and investment from the south, they also started patrols. Those patrols were extended to provide safety for the wealthy business owners, suppressing union organizing activities. There is a detailed report called MN150 that was commissioned to review the Minneapolis police history as they approached their 150 year anniversary. It is available online.

Anyway, my husband and I became foster parents working with children with severe emotional disturbances. He had been laid off from his manufacturing job during the slow winter months, so he was the primary caretaker. The first child we cared for attended Cornerstone School in Buffalo with other struggling children. He had been born with Fetal Alcohol Effect that resulted in angry and sometimes violent outbursts when he became frustrated. After a high carb meal he would go from 0 to 60 in mere seconds. This often resulted in calls from the school to the local Sheriff. Then the school would call my husband to come and pick up the child. My husband got to know the deputies, and they got to know him. They no longer pulled him over as someone to be feared and checked out. He was accepted as belonging in our community.

One day a few years ago I was out delivering my Christmas rum cakes and had an extra one. I pulled over next to one of the deputies sitting in a parking lot in Delano and offered it to him. I don’t want to go all Andy Griffith on you, but relationships do help.