OT - City of Minneapolis

[Coolbreeze44]

Games are canceled, great. Stop committing crime, stop resisting arrest, and stop unloading your service weapon into suspects. Can we do these three things?

[bleedspeed]

7 p.m. curfew in Hennepin, Ramsey, Anoka, Dakota counties. Millions more in lost revenue for businesses trying to hold on. Practice canceled for kids. Minnesota Nice!

[thedoper]

Poor girl was yelling taser and didnt even know it was her gun. Its sad.

[Lipoli390]

Games are canceled, great. Stop committing crime, stop resisting arrest, and stop unloading your service weapon into suspects. Can we do these three things?

Well said, Cool. I can't add anything. It's so depressing!

[TheGrey08]

Are you similarly appalled at the black on black crime happening every night in Chicago? Should the government wake the hell up and do something about that? Yes, there are a few incidents of police brutality every year and some result in injury and death. Cops are human and like anybody else make mistakes. There are also some bad apples that shouldn't be cops. But most are good, decent professionals who put their life on the line every shift. What training do you want them to get? Make sure you take a bullet or knife before the career criminal does? Let criminals get away with all crime if they show any resistance or flee? I wish the people who have never been in that life or death situation would STFU.

Yes the government actually can do more to help crime laden areas like what you reference in Chicago. One part of the problem in areas like that was caused by bad laws. Fully ending the BS war on drugs, legalizing cannabis and expunging all cannabis crime and investing in problem areas and funding troubled schools far far more would be a great place to start.

Have you ever looked into how much training law enforcement officers get in other countries compared to the US? Countries with longer training periods seem to have less issues and I don't think that's just a coincidence.

I'm not some beat up on the cops type and I don't blame everything on them either. My grandfather was a cop for 22 years and my mom was a LEO at a county jail for several years as well. It's a tough ass job, there's no doubting that, but we still have to hold them to a higher standard. My mom had to go through use of force training at the jail once a year until their captain decided to increase it to twice a year.

I also understand we have problems with policing, problems with laws affecting certain groups of people far more negatively and we also have community problems. Some people blame it all on one or the other, but it all can and needs to be better.

For starters though, law enforcement training should be far longer than the pathetic 10 weeks in some states (yes 10 weeks of training before they start carrying a gun on the job). The high end in the US is 36 weeks, which IMO is also pretty low considering the job. More thorough training would help weed out bad apples more easily as well as better preparing them for the job in general. De-escalation is another area that clearly isn't trained enough. Counties and major cities also need to bring mental health to the forefront and have their officers routinely seeing a counselor/therapist. They go through a lot of shit and need a professional mental health outlet.

Games are canceled, great. Stop committing crime, stop resisting arrest, and stop unloading your service weapon into suspects. Can we do these three things?

It would be extremely nice if we could. It's just so damn frustrating, depressing and tragic.

[TheGrey08]

Bleed wrote: "She was the type of person that didn't get her job by merit.."

If you know something we don't know Bleed... by all means share it. Otherwise, that kind of commentary is shitty and a huge part of the problem.

I am sorry you took it that way.

Just speaking from as a person that is a friend of a fire chief and him acknowledging best candidates are not hired. (He got his job over a friend that outscored him due to him having past military service) I don't care what race or sex a person is as long as they are the best for the job. Sometimes those skills might be unique or fill in gaps on a team, but someone that is combative with courts and tries to say that dispatch and others did their job wrong was pretty telling.

I can't say that surprises me at all.

I still just don't see the point in it nor think making that kind of assumption is helpful. It's easy to look at someone in the negative light, but I'm guessing none of us know what it's like to be in that situation. Seeing someone in distress, your job literally being to help people, rescue people, save people in distress and a fellow first responder ignores your pleas, stopping you from doing the very thing you are trained to do and the person dies. It's no wonder she got more and more emotional on scene. Who wouldn't in her position?

Lets put ourselves in that position for a minute and think about how horrible it would feel. Replaying the incident over and over and over in your head, could I have done this or that better/differently. Knowing you literally watched someone die and feel deep down you could have saved them. Would you be emotional? Would you be angry? Would your nerves be calm on the witness stand?

[bleedspeed]

Poor girl was yelling taser and didnt even know it was her gun. Its sad.

Truly tragic! I feel for the mother. She seems like she tried to keep this kid on the right path, but he resisted. You can't control the world, but you can control your interactions with it. My wife and I are getting way too much practice talking to our kids about it.

[Lipoli390]

Poor girl was yelling taser and didnt even know it was her gun. Its sad.

It's pathetic. She's a 26-year veteran of the police department. Maybe she missed the day they were training on the difference between a taser and gun. Or maybe they didn't adequately screen for temperament and pose when they hired her. I listened to how totally panicked she was as she screamed "taser, taser." She was there with two really big male cops dealing with a much smaller young guy who wasn't holding a weapon and who appeared to be trying to get away in a simple traffic stop for an expired license plate. The warrant was for a misdemeanor that did not involve violence.

What Chauvin did was pure evil. What this officer did was unbelievably incompetent. But she wasn't the only example of incompetence. Her colleague - a huge guy who was much bigger than Daunte - somehow couldn't keep Daunte from climbing back into his car. It looked like he was just casually going through the motions as he tried to cuff the guy. Further, I heard a former police chief mention how dumb and contrary to standard practice it was for that big officer to attempt to cuff a suspect just outside the open driver's door. He said you're supposed to take the person to the back of the car away from the car door.

I had an uncle who was a cop in Philadelphia. He once told me he had a lot of scary encounters, but he said as a cop you can't let the fear control you. He was in the infantry in WWII and said he learned that discipline while there. I have no doubt it's not easy to be a cop. I certainly wouldn't want to be one. There's a police officer undergoing surgery right now in Knoxville, TN after showing up to confront someone with a gun in a high school. He put his life on the line as so many cops do to protect all of us. We have to appreciate and respect that. However, if you choose to be a police officer, you'd better be up to it. Meanwhile, police departments obviously need to do a better job of screening applicants, training them once they're hired and holding them accountable when they fall short of standards. And instead of defunding police departments, we ought to better fund them and pay more to attract the best talent to perform the really, really tough job of a police officer in a Country filled with guns and really bad violent people. Incidentally, Daunte was not one of those really bad violent people and neither was George Floyd. Both should be alive today.

And now people are again vandalizing and looting stores as they victimize their own community, including people who had nothing to do with Daunte's death. The insanity continues.

[bleedspeed]

Meanwhile, police departments obviously need to do a better job of screening applicants, training them once they're hired and holding them accountable when they fall short of standards. And instead of defunding police departments, we ought to better fund them and pay more to attract the best talent to perform the really, really tough job of a police officer in a Country filled with guns and really bad violent people. Incidentally, Daunte was not one of those really bad violent people and neither was George Floyd. Both should be alive today.

And now people are again vandalizing and looting stores as they victimize their own community, including people who had nothing to do with Daunte's death. The insanity continues.

Agree with all points. Sadly it will have to get worse before it gets better as good cops and people that would make good cops see what is going on and realize it is not worth it. It is crazy how things are so much different than 20 years ago after 911.

[mrhockey89]

Cool, I read a couple pages of responses but not all of them. Here is my take.. I live in Eden Prairie, which is definitely out of the action and have been working from home since last April, but I am in Uptown about twice a week, mostly in the evenings, where one of my good friends lives (near the Walgreens that was looted off 27th/Hennepin). The violence is definitely way up, specifically car jackings, shootings, and people stealing catalytic converters. As far as the city, for a long while after the Floyd death, there was graffiti all over buildings. Many remained closed. Lots of ACAB, #BLM, and other stuff. That very Walgreens remained closed for about 6-7ish months I'd guestimate? They actually just opened back up a month or two ago and have already been fully looted again. I don't know why a business would want to move into the area. Can't speak to Downtown but a lot of that emptiness I think has to do with COVID. In general, I don't feel overly unsafe around her place in Uptown, though I know that Walgreens suffers a fair amount of thefts being they're 24 hours in the middle of Uptown.

A lot of graffiti still remains so that is where I would agree with your friend (if his visit was recent, and if he's talking uptown), and the crime is on a big time spike. No longer would I feel safe with my friend (female) walking alone late at night. I didn't have quite as much concern prior to the last year. She wants to move out of the city because she doesn't feel safe overall. So I wouldn't say it's a sh!thole, but I would say if I was a resident or a business, I don't see why anyone would be dying to move to Minneapolis right now.