Star Tribune
Duluth Police Department’s top priority after racial bias audit: Honing pedestrian stops
DULUTH – The Duluth Police Department’s top priority for fixes, following the release of the 90-page Racial Bias Audit conducted by outside consultants and released to the public in August, is to hone the way officers engage in pedestrian stops.
The nearly yearlong study by the Boston-based Crime and Justice Institute found that most of these are pretext stops to determine whether crimes are occurring — though they tend to end with a verbal warning or no action. These stops occur within four of the city’s neighborhoods: Central Hillside and its adjacent business district, East Hillside and Lincoln Park. Nine stops involved use of force. Some 26% of the people stopped were Black, Indigenous or people of color — though there isn’t enough data on all pedestrian stops to know whether this is a disparity, according to the report.
Police Chief Mike Ceynowa said officers have not consistently introduced themselves or the reason for the pedestrian stop, a shift from procedure that he thinks might have started with the pandemic.
“There is always that opportunity, once a situation is defused or de-escalated, to let people know why you’re there and who you are,” he said. “And I think that goes a long way to start to build that trust and that relationship.”
This will be a top topic on the department’s to-do list as it enters the implementation phase of the audit. The final of three public presentations wrapped up Sept. 7 at the downtown Family Freedom Center and the team behind the deep-dive into local policing stressed that the report is just start of the work. The audit team will meet with a group from the Police Department for several hours this week to talk about priorities, how to measure success, and a feasible timeline to get it done.
“The worst thing that can happen after an audit is for a report to sit on a shelf and for no one to do anything with it,” said Katie Zafft, the institute’s project manager who is coincidentally from Duluth.
The audit was instigated by the local chapter of the NAACP’s call to bring use of force and arrest rates to numbers that were proportionate with Duluth’s demographics. In 2021, Mayor Emily Larson announced that outside consultants would be hired to analyze the department. The Crime and Justice Institute was paid more than $270,000 and tasked with studying 11 categories, ranging from Black, Indigenous or people of color community relations to body-cam footage and recruitment and training.
Larson said she did not find anything shocking in the team’s report.
“Now is when we have the community conversations, now is when we’re engaging people,” she said. “I’ve been grateful and impressed with the way the community is paying attention.”
The presentations have been interactive, with community members asking questions about the process — or using personal experiences to poke at the findings.
At a recent meeting, a member of the audience passed around information about Mutual Aid Tail Light Repair, which offers free fixes for broken lights — an effort to curb stops based on the equipment failure. People snapped photographs of the brochure and kept the information circling.
Through the meetings, Zafft has listened closely and taken notes. A recent takeaway was the need to focus on police interactions with people who visit the Chum food shelf. The presentation at the Family Freedom Center covered the meatiest of the report’s topics, Zafft said — ones related to Black, Indigenous or people of color relations, traffic and pedestrian stops, and the review of body-worn camera footage.
“People knew there were racial disparities, particularly in stops,” she said. “That was anecdotal until the audit. We were able to put an exclamation point on things, to validate their experiences. People were nodding and looking at each other.”
A St. Paul man who was in critical condition following a fire last week at his home in the Battle Creek neighborhood has died, marking the city’s eighth fire death this year.
According to a news release from the St. Paul Fire Department, the man was found unconscious in the basement of a house on Nelson Street early in the morning of Oct. 17, after fire crews had extinguished a fire at the two-story residence. Paramedics undertook life-saving measures before taking him to the hospital.
No one else was injured in the fire, which was found to have been accidental and started in the engine of a car parked in the tuck-under garage. The fire was confined to the garage, but heavy smoke filled the house. Smoke detectors enabled others in the house to exit safely, officials said.
That hasn’t ebbed with Simpli-Fi. The startup incorporated in 2018 as a company based out of Florida that integrated technology systems together in commercial buildings to work as a single unit. But business sputtered when the COVID-19 pandemic began, and Campbell had to make staff cuts to his team of 16 employees. He called it one of “the worst times” of his life.
“But during that time is where we made a pivot,” Campbell said.
He set out to find a new technology, eventually spotting NASA’s electronic nose thanks to Brown Venture Group, a St. Paul based firm that supports Black, Latino and Indigenous tech startups. Campbell’s brother, Paul Campbell, is a partner at the firm but said he recused himself from the investment decision.
Chris Campbell was skeptical of the electronic nose’s capabilities at first but sprung for a commercialization license after spending a year researching the technology. By this past summer, he had moved the company to Minnesota and specifically the Osborne building because both are “known for device creation,” he said.
Simpli-Fi’s sensor packs some of the science of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry — which require huge machines — into a sensor the size of a dime, Campbell said. Using nanotubes, the sensor picks up metabolic qualities in the air and breath, he said.
For now, the company is focused on the C. diff-sensing Provectus Canary device, which scans the air around a hospital patient to detect the bacteria that causes the infection, which has gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhea. The company is working toward the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval for using the sensor to detect various diseases.
A Minneapolis man was sentenced Friday to 20 years in prison for murdering his neighbor in their North Side apartment building last year.
Walter Lee Hill, 59, had pleaded guilty on Monday to second-degree intentional murder. He will get credit for having served nearly a year in jail.
Police were called to the Gateway Lofts on W. Broadway Avenue last November on a report that someone was shot. Officers found Donald Edmondson, 60, dead on the floor of his apartment with a gunshot wound to the chest.
A video camera in the hallway showed Hill knocking on Edmondson’s door, reaching into his sweatshirt pocket and firing his gun once. Hill then left in his Lexus, which officers found near Elliot Park downtown.
They spotted Hill walking nearby, asked for his ID and arrested him when he said something to the effect that they had the right guy.
A witness told police they saw Hill shoot Edmondson, and another said there had been an ongoing dispute between the two. Two days before the murder, Hill had called police because he believed neighbors were breaking into his apartment.
In a statement, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said Edmondson “should still be alive. A violent act committed with such disregard by Mr. Hill has taken him from his family. This sentence delivers accountability and protects our community, and I hope it brings some measure of peace to Mr. Edmondson’s loved ones as they attempt to move forward with their lives.”
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