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.”
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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