Making Our Streets Safer: Insights from the MPD Meeting
On Thursday, I attended MPD’s public MSTAT meeting. MPD hosts these meetings weekly and they are open to the public quarterly or so. At the meeting, the police discuss crime trends across all precincts, honor people who’ve shown excellence in their job, and connect with community members. I will also be writing two more newsletters on my views on policing & public safety as well as police reform, so stay tuned for those. For now, I’d like to relay some information from the meeting.
Honoring Daniel Hernandez. Daniel Hernandez, who owns the Colonial Market stores, was honored for his work partnering with MPD in recruiting folks from the Latino community to be police officers. Colonial Market is set to open a store at the former Aldi location in Ward 4 soon. I definitely want to check it out!
Juvenile Crime. Sergeant Parton spoke about juvenile crime trends. He reiterated what many of us know, which is that a large amount of juvenile crime is being committed by a small number of people. He said they are seeing trends of younger and younger youths committing crimes: it used to be 15-16 year-olds, but now they are seeing children as young as 10 stealing cars. This, he said, creates a situation where these folks are not just a danger to the community, but also to themselves and to each other. He stated that while the county does have diversion programs, these diversion programs do not respond to the intensity that these children need – the 10-year-old, he said, needs intensive care to work on the trauma he’s experienced. He is happy Hennepin County is finally seeing the need for a juvenile crisis stabilization center in 18th & Chicago, and hopes more will come.
Reasons for optimism. At the end of the meeting, Chief O’Hara said there’s a “dramatically different” feeling at MPD from when he took over two years ago. At that time, he said, staff was shrinking every month, and there was “not a feeling of hope”. But in 2024, he said, we turned a corner. There have already been 24 new hires in 2025, with 25 more in the pipeline, and 50 interns en route to becoming cadets. There’s also a community service officer program, where people are hired out of high school, paid a salary, have their college paid for, and become a sworn officer afterward. He then invited the violence interrupters from Touch Outreach to come up, and he praised their partnership with the police. For those of us wanting more police officers, this felt like a ray of hope.
Ward 7 spans three different police precincts – Bryn Mawr in Precinct 4; Downtown West and Loring Park in Precinct 1; and Loring Heights, Lowry Hill, Kenwood, East Isles, Cedar-Isles-Dean, Linden Hills, and West Maka Ska in Precinct 5. If elected, I promise to have regular meetings with police inspectors in all wards and host meetings with precinct inspectors and the communities they represent to help strengthen the relationships between police and the communities they represent. That is a great segue into an email on public safety and police reform – stay tuned!