Star Tribune
Former Minneapolis Chief Tony Bouza hailed as police innovator
An in-your-face New Yorker, a self-effacing intellectual and a scientifically minded police reformer, Tony Bouza was eulogized at a memorial meeting Saturday in Minneapolis.
The former Minneapolis police chief died June 26 at the Almira Choice care center in Bloomington at the age of 94.
Several internationally known experts on policing methodologies spoke at an afternoon program at the McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota, a testament to the impact Bouza made on the police profession during both his time as a police official in New York City and tenure as Minneapolis chief from 1981 to 1988.
“Tony Bouza was asked to come to Minneapolis specifically as an outsider to make systemic changes within the Minneapolis Police Department,” Police Chief Brian O’Hara said. “The parallels between his career and mine are not lost on me. Tony had a reputation as a straight-talking atypical cop who wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.”
By any standard, Bouza stood out. While a strong advocate for police, he condemned racism within his own department and vowed to rid it of “thumpers” who engaged in excessive force.
He was a voracious reader, the speakers said, and would quote Rudyard Kipling and Voltaire to make his points. He authored a dozen books. Joseph Selvaggio, a close friend of Bouza’s and founder of Project for Pride in Living, which builds housing for people on low incomes, said Bouza’s books “would force you to the dictionary.”
Bouza kept his door wide open, and visitors could hurry past the receptionist and walk into his office in City Hall.
“As chief, anyone could see him without an appointment and without being screened,” recalled Tony Bouza, one of his two sons. Son Dominick also spoke and chaired the meeting. “Our phone was listed in the phone book. We got calls late at night.”
Several speakers mentioned Bouza’s wife, Erica, who became well known in the 1980s for engaging in peaceful civil disobedience protests against the manufacture of cluster bombs, requiring Bouza’s police officers to arrest her, along with hundreds of others. Chief Bouza brought the protesters cookies while they waited on buses to be processed.
Lawrence W. Sherman, chief scientific officer for the London Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard, flew in from London to speak at the memorial and described the enormous impact Bouza had on the Minneapolis and New York police departments. He said Bouza gave “birth to evidence-based policing” with police initiatives that were repeated worldwide.
Those included conducting computerized analysis of addresses that received the most calls from police and concentrating efforts to resolve the issues that made the addresses so problematic.
Charles Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, an independent research organization based in Washington, D.C., described how Bouza employed an experiment that altered the way many cities across the country handled domestic violence cases.
Many police departments, when called to a domestic dispute, would simply separate the parties, telling the husband or partner to take a walk — and that was it. In a number of cases, the husband would return and assault the spouse again.
Bouza wanted to know if arresting the spouse would make a difference, and so officers were randomly assigned to either arrest or not arrest the partner or try some form of counseling and see if an arrest made a difference.
Although unprecedented and risky, the practice seemed to work, became the norm and the Minneapolis model became the national standard, Wexler said.
Several states passed laws making the arrest of domestic abusers mandatory, Wexler said. Bouza collaborated with Wexler, and other outside police experts, in developing projects, and Minneapolis became known inationally as a laboratory for police innovations.
“Chief Bouza shook things up,” said Sharon Sayles Belton, former Minneapolis mayor. “He ruffled a lot of feathers,” she said, but he was committed to a strategy “of building community trust.”
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
ROCHESTER – The Federal Transit Administration has green-lighted an $85 million grant supporting the development of the city’s planned Link Bus Rapid Transit system.
The FTA formally announced the grant on Friday during a ceremonial check presentation outside of the Mayo Civic Center, one of the seven stops planned for the bus line. The federal grant will cover about 60% of the project’s estimated $143.4 million price tag, with the remaining funds coming from Destination Medical Center, the largest public-private development project in state history.
Set to go live in 2026, the 2.8-mile Link system will connect downtown Rochester, including Mayo Clinic’s campuses, with a proposed “transit village” that will include parking, hundreds of housing units and a public plaza. The bus line will be the first of its kind outside the Twin Cities — with service running every five minutes during peak hours.
“That means you may not even need to look at a schedule,” said Veronica Vanterpool, deputy administrator for the FTA. “You can just show up at your transit stop and expect the next bus to come in a short time. That is a game changer and a life-transformational experience in transit for those people who are using it and relying on it.”
The planned Second Street corridor is already one of the busiest roads in Rochester, carrying more than 21,800 vehicles a day, and city planners have talked for years about ways to reduce traffic congestion in the city’s downtown. Local officials estimate that the transit line, which will rely on a fleet of all-electric buses, will handle 11,000 riders on its first day of operation and save eight city blocks of parking.
Speaking to a crowd of about 100 people gathered on Friday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the project shows Rochester is thinking strategically about how it handles growth.
“If you just plan the business expansion, and you don’t have the workforce, you don’t have the child care, the housing or the transit, it’s not going to work very well as a lot of communities across the nation have found,” Klobuchar said.
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