[Mpls] Challenge to Mayor Rybak and Black Community by Dwight Hobbes

[Shawn Lewis]

Last update: August 29, 2004 at 7:02 PM
Dwight Hobbes: Inner-city blacks must protest cutback in cops 
Dwight Hobbes 
August 30, 2004 
Nine officers are expected to retire from the Minneapolis 
Police Department next year and, if Mayor R.T. Rybak can 
get his projected 2005 budget past the City Council, those 
cops will not be replaced. 

It would be most responsible of him to take another look at 
the books and figure out somewhere else to make this cut. 
Starting, for instance, with the $200,000 that will be spent 
on, of all things, a study on streetcars on the Midtown Greenway. 

Not that the study shouldn't someday happen, but, just now, 
public safety is a great deal more important. Accordingly, 
Rybak ought to reevaluate his priorities.

Inner-city African-Americans, many of whom have had the most 
trouble with cops and condemn the Minneapolis Police Department 
as racist, in their own best interest ought to be first in line 
trying to help the MPD. 

Activists who've protested racial profiling and selective 
excessive force would do well to vehemently speak out and 
demonstrate against decreasing the police force. Regular, 
everyday citizens should be dispatching letters and telephone 
calls demanding that their City Council representatives 
oppose this planned cut. 

This is not at all to mitigate the Police Department's 
documented history of singling out black drivers and treating 
residents in black neighborhoods to storm trooper tactics. 
However, it is to state that anyone with common sense who dials 
911 would rather have a profiling, arbitrarily head-knocking cop 
respond to the call than no one at all. And inner-city African-Americans 
increasingly find themselves needing to dial 911.

Police officers, frankly, are the only protection they have. 
There is no place to turn when crack is peddled practically on 
their doorsteps. There's no one else to call when they're victimized 
by burglarizing junkies. The plague of drug traffic continually 
worsens in their neighborhoods and certainly won't lessen with fewer 
cops on patrol. There's long been a hue and cry for more cops of 
color -- but with nine fewer positions, well, do the math.

Mayor Rybak's proposed budget sends a sign that he's not terribly 
concerned about inner-city Minneapolis -- which, after all, is where 
rampant lawlessness remains a fact of life. This is where gangland 
gunfire still tragically affects the quality of life as homicidal 
thugs murder not only one another but innocent bystanders, including 
children like slain 13-year-old Tyesha Edwards, who caught a stray 
bullet while sitting down to do homework in her Minneapolis home. 

Rybak, quoted in Pulse of the Twin Cities, calls the Edwards family 
his friends. On what basis? It's doubtful he generally has them 
over to dinner. Or that they can reach him at home. It's clear, 
however, that any loss of cops on the job heightens his "friends' 
" chances losing another family member and the chances that some 
other family similarly will suffer. 

The mayor would do a great deal better, instead of expediently 
talking feel-good talk, to responsibly walk the walk, making it 
a priority that inner-city life doesn't get any worse. 

The last thing crime-ridden communities need is a weakening of 
the only thing standing between decent folk and criminals.

Dwight Hobbes is a writer based in Minneapolis.

Posted by Shawn Lewis, Field Neighborhood



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