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The City Council of Minneapolis wants to change how their police force operates and because of state laws these elected officials have been unable to for years.
State Attorney General Keith Ellison said he is well aware the state has long-standing policing challenges. “The reforms thus far have been halting, inadequate, and just put it on the shelf until we get to the next tragedy,” he said. “Without tragedies to keep propelling it, it gets ignored after a while.”Ellison said that it will take cultural and political change to fix the relationship between police and the communities in Minnesota, but that policy fixes can help. The COVID-19 pandemic stalled the progress of a working group on “police-involved deadly force encounters,” which Ellison leads alongside the state’s public safety commissioner. In February, the group released 28 recommendations including new training standards and independent investigations into the use of deadly force.But many of the suggested changes require the state legislature’s approval. If the recent past is any guide, they are unlikely to gain much traction. Since 2015, elected leaders have proposed more than a dozen police reform bills, but failed to pass or substantially advance any of them. Several of the failed bills would have overhauled statewide standards for when cops can use force, and set up independent investigations for fatal incidents. Another would have funded training on racial bias and de-escalation for officers in the state’s larger departments.Some of Ellison’s proposals fall under the guidance of the state’s Peace Officers Standards and Training Board, or POST, which oversees police licences for all law enforcement across Minnesota. Those suggestions would beef up the board’s power to suspend or revoke a cop’s license. But at present, Ellison said, the agency doesn’t have enough power to enforce standards and the legislature has not adopted a proposal to give it that power.“Currently POST is not a force for change,” Ellison said. “It’s more of just a passthrough.”Ellison, who was outspoken on policing issues as a six-term U.S. Congressman, said if he was dissatisfied with county prosecutor Mike Freeman’s handling of the Floyd case, he could ask the governor to hand the case to the Attorney General’s office, where Ellison could oversee the prosecution directly.Freeman said late Thursday in a press conference that while “no person should do” what officer Chauvin did, “there’s other evidence that does not support a criminal charge,” and that he wasn’t going to “rush to justice.”It remained unclear whether charges against the officers would stop violent protests that on Thursday entered their third day and prompted the governor to activate the National Guard.And a criminal prosecution might not bring peace to Floyd’s family. After Castile’s death in 2016, officer Jeronimo Yanez was charged in the killing, but a jury found him not guilty of all charges.Asked what he would tell people like Castile, who are frustrated and feel that little or nothing has changed, Ellison replied: "I only got one thing for Valerie in that regard. We have to try. I'm not going to tell her something has changed. I'm going to tell her we're going to try to change it."
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