Star Tribune
Minneapolis failing in response to domestic violence calls
Minneapolis police often don’t attempt to track down domestic abusers who flee a scene before the officers arrive — leaving victims more vulnerable and empowering their assailants — according to a study published Thursday assessing how the department responds to calls of intimate-partner violence.
Minneapolis officers also communicate to victims with gender, racial or other biases that sow distrust and make some less likely to call 911 in the future, the researchers found.
The study, published Thursday by Minneapolis-based nonprofit Global Rights for Women, identifies a series of gaps in how the Police Department handles domestic violence cases. The assessment took three years and cites input from Minneapolis Police Department leadership, the Minneapolis City Attorney’s Office, Hennepin County officials, a judge and a range of experts and advocates who work with survivors of domestic violence. It also includes anecdotes and quotes from survivors who participated in several focus groups. They are not identified by name.
The study found officers often fail to interview witnesses to an abuser’s conduct, including children, or document their identity and contact information, making it more difficult to prosecute these cases. Minneapolis police also don’t always properly document property crimes that accompany domestic violence, in turn depleting a victims’ physical and economic security and chances for restitution. The department doesn’t use data to identify and divert resources toward the most dangerous offenders, the study found.
The latter group of serial abusers are among those who often avoid arrest by fleeing the scene before police arrive, said study director Melissa Petrangelo Scaia.
“It’s almost like abusers in Minneapolis have figured out if you’re not there when the cops come they’re never going to come looking for you,” Scaia said.
Minneapolis city and police department officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
‘Police didn’t care’
In the United States, about 10 million people are victims of intimate-partner violence every year, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
From 2019 through 2022 in Minneapolis, about 1⁄3 of the 11,645 incidents of aggravated assaults were classified as domestic assaults, according to data tracked by police. Domestic assaults in the city are down slightly in 2023 compared to last year, but the data shows they’re still elevated 8% from prior three-year averages, tracking with greater violent crime trends in the city.
Out of more than 2,000 domestic assault victims identified in Minneapolis police data from 2021 through this year, about 70% involved a boyfriend, girlfriend or ex-partner. About 7% of victims were spouses of the offender, and 5% were children. The vast majority of victims — nearly 80% — were female.
Scaia said the new study started as a follow-up to a 2017 report from the Minneapolis Police Conduct Oversight Commission— an arm of the city’s civil rights division — that found only 20% of more than 43,000 domestic violence calls led to reports or arrests. That puts Minneapolis in stark contrast from similar data reported the same year by the Justice Department, which found police throughout the country took a report in 78% of these types of calls on average and 39% led to arrest or charges.
The Minneapolis Police Department has seen a rise in violent crime and an precedented exodus of officers since the 2017 report, exacerbating lags in emergency response times and spreading investigators thinner.
One of the unnamed survivors cited in the report described how in May 2022 her partner pressed a gun to her head and dragged her with his car, breaking her nose. She said she called 911 and waited at a gas station with witnesses to the assault, but it took an hour and a half for officers to arrive. In the meantime, her partner stole her car. When police did show up, “I was covered in blood but I think they didn’t think it was serious. He was driving around looking for me. He drove by while police were there, and I pointed him out, but they didn’t do anything.”
Another said she was repeatedly beaten by a her husband while she was pregnant, and her attacker didn’t relent after she took out an order for protection. When police failed to intervene, he began to assault her mother. “I feel I’ve called hundreds of times. He’d run and come back. I feel police didn’t care because he was my husband.”
The study found that women of color were at greater risk of not being helped, and some felt they needed to carry weapons to defend themselves rather than call the police. One survivor, who is Black, said her neighbors called 911 after her partner grabbed her out of the shower and choked her. Police burst into the bathroom and found her partner bleeding, and she said they arrested her instead of him.
Recommendations to close gaps
The report authors list several recommendations for Minneapolis police to improve responses to intimate-partner violence calls, including adding explicit policy language for calls when a suspect is gone before police arrive. Supervisors should ensure compliance, and the department should create specialized positions for investigating domestic calls, the report said.
The study authors point to a “Blueprint For Safety” adopted by St. Paul as a model. The document instructs police in St. Paul to gather specific information when a suspect flees before arrival, and provides steps for how to follow-up urgently and protect victims.
Police should receive training on implicit and explicit biases, and the department should develop risk assessment tools for female same-sex relationships and immigrant victims. The Police Department should direct officers how to gather information from children who witness assaults, provide regular trainings on witness interviews and identify and address officers filing incomplete reports. And it should create a data-centric approach to identifying high-risk offenders and triaging resources toward those cases, according to the study.
Star Tribune data reporter Jeff Hargarten contributed to this report.
Star Tribune
Celebrity chef Justin Sutherland gets two years of probation for threatening girlfriend
According to the criminal complaint:
Police were twice called on June 28 to an apartment in the 800 block of Front Avenue. During the first call, a woman told officers that everything was fine despite previously reporting that Sutherland had choked her and tried kicking her out of the apartment.
During the second call about 90 minutes later, the woman told police that Sutherland had briefly squeezed her neck with both hands, said “I want you dead,” pointed a gun at her and hit her in the chest with it, and at one point said he would shoot her if she came back after running off. Officers then arrested Sutherland.
Staff writers Paul Walsh and Alex Chhith contributed to this story.
Operators of the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center (JDC) have agreed to consolidate housing units, create a new programming schedule and retrain correctional officers in an effort to satisfy state regulators, who rebuked the downtown facility last month for violating resident rights.
Changes come in the wake of a scathing inspection report that accused the center of placing minors in seclusion without good reason to compensate for ongoing staff shortages. An annual audit by the Department of Corrections found that teens were frequently locked in their rooms for long stretches, due to a lack of personnel rather than bad behavior.
In response, county officials vowed to bolster staffing and retrain all officers tasked with performing wellness checks. Last week, the facility closed its “orientation mod,” typically reserved for new admissions, and combined male age groups to reduce the number of living units and provide heightened supervision.
The moves, including a new schedule, are expected to help prevent the undue cancellation of recreation, parent visits and other privileges to children in their custody.
“[Previous] staffing levels did not allow for all units to run programming simultaneously while having sufficient staff available to respond to incidents and emergencies in the building,” JDC Superintendent Dana Swayze wrote in a seven-page letter to state inspectors. “Programming is only cancelled on an as-needed basis based on the JDC’s ability to safely accommodate [it].”
In a Dec. 4 email to the County Board, Mary Ellen Heng, acting director of Hennepin’s Department of Community Corrections and Rehabilitation, assured elected officials that they had begun taking corrective actions but asserted that some of the report’s findings lacked context.
Heng pointed to a violation where teens were allegedly confined without cause, even when multiple correctional officers were sitting in a nearby office. She explained that, during the dates of the inspection earlier this fall, several officers observed in the office were still in training — and therefore not permitted to interact with the youths alone.
She also contended that while programming has been modified by staffing limitations, “this additional room time is not reflective of punishment, disciplinary techniques, or restrictive procedures.”
Tired of surging gun violence across St. Paul, community leaders and police are asking residents to help create a safer city.
The call for community support came Thursday night when officials from the St. Paul NAACP, St. Paul Police Department, Black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and the African American Leadership Council gathered at Arlington Hills Lutheran Church to talk about ways to decrease gun violence in the city.
St. Paul has recorded 30 homicides so far this year according to a Star Tribune database, two fewer than last year. But four of this year’s homicides happened in the same week, frustrating law enforcement and alarming residents.
St. Paul NAACP President Richard Pittman Sr. said that solutions to gun violence are “right here, in the room.” But without the community’s help, Pittman said their efforts could fall short.
“Over the last several weeks and months, we have experienced an uptick in violent crimes in our communities. [That’s] turned on a light bulb that it’s time [to] not have the police feeling like all the pressure is on them,” Pittman said. “Nobody wants to the responsibility of having to shoot someone down in the street. Nobody wants the responsibility of hurting somebody’s family. We all want the best outcome.”
Attendee Carrie Johnson worried generational trauma is derailing youth’s behavior, adding that she’s seen boys in middle school punch girls in the face. Migdalia Baez said mothers living along Rice Street feel they have nowhere to turn for help in redirecting their children. Some worry that their child would be incarcerated if they ask for help.
Larry McPherson, a violence interrupter for 21 Days of Peace St. Paul, said some issues stem from youth with no guidance. McPherson and others patrol hot spots for crime across the city, including near the Midway neighborhood’s Kimball Court apartments where fentanyl drove a spike in robberies and drug violations.
“We’ve got a lot of mental health [struggles]. We’ve got a lot of doggone drug addiction that’s going on in our neighborhoods. We all got the best interests at hand for all people in our community, but we’re just not working fast enough,” McPherson said. “Until we get feet on the ground, people coming out of their own community and standing up for this real cause to take back the community, we’re going to have the same outcome.”
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings