Star Tribune
Minneapolis neighbors want to determine the Third Precinct’s second act
The Third Precinct’s neighbors had no say in what happened three years ago.
They want a say in what happens next.
The charred wreck of the police station has stood at the corner of Lake and Minnehaha for three and a half years, wrapped in razor wire and bad memories.
“People tell me that when they drive by there, their stomachs sink. They have a horrible feeling,” said Fred Brathwaite, who lived two blocks from the precinct on the night of May 28, 2020, when he saw the red glow of fire through his windows.
The precinct was burning. Along with neighborhood grocery stores, restaurants and mom and pop shops, as grief over George Floyd’s murder turned to rage.
Many ruined businesses rebuilt or are rebuilding. The precinct remained unchanged. A daily reminder of the sting of tear gas, the crunch of broken glass underfoot and the terror of the neighbors who stayed up all night with their garden hoses aimed at their roofs.
Brathwaite thinks this neighborhood deserves better.
Just before Thanksgiving, neighbors along Lake Street gathered at the Hook and Ladder Theater, next door to the precinct ruins, to talk about the Third Precinct’s second act.
A Black cultural center. That’s Brathwaite’s dream for the site.
Brathwaite, who owns Mama Sheila’s House of Soul restaurant with his wife, Sheila, has lined up support for the idea and the pro bono services of DJR Architecture. As he talked in the Hook and Ladder, a projection screen behind him lit up with images of uses the neighborhood could make of a center like that. Museum exhibits. Classrooms. A wellness center with exercise equipment and basketball courts. Retail space for small businesses and restaurants. Event space for concerts and art shows and celebrations.
“We have a historic moment, we have a historic opportunity. We can’t let it slip by,” he said. If you have an idea of your own for the site, send them to Brathwaite at mplsblackculturalcenter@gmail.com.
It was nice to hear people talking about the site’s future, not just its past. The Longfellow Community Council has been working on it for years. Local artists turned the ruined precinct into a canvas earlier this year, projecting a better future on its walls. Flames and pain, slowly shifting to images of flowers and smiling children and a community knitting back together.
That’s what Brathwaite remembers most about those days. Not the people who tore Minneapolis apart after George Floyd’s murder. He remembers the ones who came to help.
“These protesters, they walked, they marched right in front of my business,” said Brathwaite, who remembers marveling at how many white people were marching to protest the murder of a Black man by a white police officer. “Ninety-five percent of the people marching were white … Instead of pulling us apart, it’s drawing us together.”
Minneapolis is moving forward with plans to build a new Third Precinct and safety center less than a mile away, at 2633 Minnehaha Av. The city still owns the former site and will have the final say on what happens there.
Now that the Third Precinct has a new home, the city can make plans for a new use for the old site at 3000 Minnehaha. City staff could approach the council, possibly as soon as next month, to begin planning a public engagement process.
A small crowd came out to listen to Brathwaite’s pitch before the holiday and even with those numbers, it was easy to see how complicated it will be to turn the page on the Third Precinct.
Some think the building should be preserved as a piece of history. Others can’t bear the sight of it.
Brathwaite is just happy the community is talking about it now. Someday, he hopes his neighbors feel good when they round the corner of Lake and Minnehaha.
“We can then walk by and look at this edifice, glimmering in Minnesota sunshine. Shimmering in Minnesota moonlight,” he said, voice soaring to the theater rafters in his excitement. “We can walk by — not with our heads bowed down in shame, but we can lift our heads up high.”
ZUMBRO RIVER VALLEY, MINN. – From his combine on an October afternoon, harvesting dried-out soybeans the color of dust, Martin Larsen points to a hillside where his ancestors from Scandinavia homesteaded.
History might be happening again on the Larsen farm.
Last year, on this plot of land along the Zumbro River, the 43-year-old farmer from Byron grew oats. Not oats for hogs or cows. But oats for humans. He hauled the oats to a miller across the state line into Iowa. A previous year, Larsen even had a contract with Oatly, the trendy Swedish maker of milk alternatives.
Something of an oat renaissance has been occurring down in the fields west of the Mississippi River. During winters, Larsen — through his job with the Olmsted County Soil and Water Conservation District — evangelized to fellow farmers on the humble small grain.
His friends and neighbors were listening. As of this fall, over 60 farmers, covering 6,000 acres across southern Minnesota, have joined Larsen’s informal coalition to grow food-grade oats. They call themselves the “oat mafia.”
Star of breakfast food, children’s books and, increasingly, those nondairy lattes, oats are easier on the environment, requiring less nitrogen than corn, which means a lot in the karst-rich hill country of southeastern Minnesota, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tasked state officials with cleaning up drinking water.
“Nitrates come from this,” said Larsen, driving his gray Gleaner combine on a patch of soybeans beneath a hillock just beyond the suburban sprawl of northwest Rochester on a recent warm Friday afternoon. “I’m not going to beat around the bush anymore. That’s what the data says.”
But as the oat mafia looks to the future, they’re struggling with a basic marketing question: Who will actually buy these oats they’re growing?
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.”
