Star Tribune
Top Hennepin County prosecutor presents strategy to curb youth auto theft
With Minneapolis already reporting 4,125 car thefts ahead of the typical summer uptick in crime, Hennepin County’s top prosecutor announced new efforts to address the crisis of youth stealing cars.
In back-to-back news conferences Wednesday at the Hennepin County Government Center, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty unveiled a collaboration with law enforcement and social workers. Meanwhile, activist and attorney Nekima Levy-Armstrong hosted a separate event after to say kids are crying out for help and more funding for community-based programming is needed to give youth something to do besides joyride in stolen cars.
Moriarty is hoping to intervene with at-risk youth and prevent crime before it occurs.
“We cannot ignore the early warning signs that a youth is headed toward behaviors that might escalate,” she said.
As part of her office launching a new focused collaboration with law enforcement, there is a hotline that Hennepin County families can call for support. Moriarty said a social worker will arrive at their home within an hour to help with mental, behavioral or emotional issues with the aim of de-escalating the situation.
Services are free and available every day between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. by calling 612-979-9511. Staff will offer ongoing stabilization after the first 72 hours by providing optional eight-week culturally specific services.
Flanked by parents, educators and activists, Levy-Armstrong said kids as young as 12 who don’t know how to drive are being chased by police — including in a pursuit that ended with a crash on the north side last week.
“This has been going on for far too long,” Levy-Armstrong said. “We do not condone what has been happening with our young folks … We need all hands on deck to address what we feel is a crisis that is happening in our community.”
Levy-Armstrong applauded Moriarty’s new initiative, but she doesn’t want a call for help to turn into child protective services (CPS) potentially being called and causing further problems for a family by taking a child away.
The collaboration includes regular intervention meetings between the attorney’s office and law enforcement agencies — five have been held so far — to identify youth in need of services. CPS and truancy teams are also there to learn about high-risk youth they believe are engaging in auto theft-related behaviors.
Moriarty said other changes to address youth auto theft involve the courts adding to their judicial review detention decisions on whether to hold youth charged with fleeing police. This charge wasn’t previously part of judicial review.
There’s also a faster turnaround for charging decisions — within one day and a first court appearance within three days if a child was admitted to the juvenile detention center but ultimately released. If the youth is not booked at the detention center, a charging decision will be made within five business days when historically, she said this took weeks or even months.
Moriarty said it’s difficult to charge youth for auto theft for a number of reasons. Sometimes officers don’t see who is actually driving, or the driver will say they didn’t know the vehicle was stolen. And if they rely on DNA evidence to determine that, it is time-consuming to get such evidence. She also said kids wear face masks, making it harder to identify the driver.
Even if youth are charged, she said, they are frequently found incompetent by psychologists to go through court proceedings.
Minneapolis clocked 2,100 car thefts at this time last year. The city has doubled that.
But at the same time, the attorney’s office has charged a fraction of those thefts, with 465 related cases. Nearly 70% of those are within the juvenile prosecution division.
Moriarty said despite this widespread problem, youth committing these crimes account for less than 3% of the population. And it’s often the same youth engaging in repeat behaviors.
Youth auto theft has been a nationwide problem ever since a TikTok video went viral in 2021 showing kids how to hotwire Kias and Hyundais in as little as 90 seconds.
Levy-Armstrong said Black and brown youth not only experienced the COVID-19 pandemic upending school and their social lives, but they were also at the epicenter of global unrest from George Floyd’s murder.
All this has impacted mental health, finances and emotional health “for too many families that were already struggling.”
“We need to get at the root of why these things are happening,” she said. “We want to see a change happen in the summer of 2023.”
St. Louis Park will soon require landlords to give renters more notice before they file for evictions over late payments.
The city currently requires landlords to give tenants notice seven days before they file for eviction. Starting in November, landlords will have to give 30 days notice and use a form prepared by the city.
“This is a tough ordinance,” Council Member Lynette Dumalag, the only person to vote against the change, said during a meeting this week. “At least for me, personally, I felt that it pit those that care about affordable housing against one another.”
In public hearings and other forums, city leaders heard from renters who said the current requirements didn’t give them enough time to scrape together payments if they face a sudden hardship, such as losing a job. They also heard from at least one landlord who said he might have to increase deposits because he already struggles to make ends meet when renters fall behind on payments.
The change passed 4 to 1. Council Member Tim Brausen and Mayor Nadia Mohamed were absent.
PARK RAPIDS, Minn. — Ryan Leckner has resigned as Mayor of Park Rapids and the city council has officially declared a vacancy.
City Administrator Angel Weasner said councilmembers will hold a workshop on Sept. 24 to determine how to proceed. They can fill the vacancy by appointment or hold a special election, which Leckner said seems unlikely given that the November general election is just around the corner.
Until then, Leckner said “we’re thinking that we’ll just be able to get by with just one less council member.”
He added that Councilmember Liz Stone would likely serve as acting mayor until voters hit the polls.
Former Park Rapids Mayor Pat Mikesh is running uncontested for Leckner’s now-vacant seat.
In 2018, Mikesh stepped down a month before the election and Leckner successfully ran as a write-in candidate.
Leckner first joined the council in 2015 and is ending his third, two-year term as mayor early because his family built a home outside city limits. Construction of the home in Henrietta Township, and the sale of his existing home in Park Rapids, all happened faster than expected, he said.
“My term was up in November anyways,” he said, “so I was kind of planning on just not running.”
In the 27 years since Rhode Island’s first charter school opened its doors, just one has closed. Segue Institute for Learning, a community charter in Central Falls, R.I., is among the state’s successes. It has an extraordinarily low student-to-teacher ratio of 4 to 1, even though it spends less than a typical Rhode Island school.
Part III
How Rhode Island’s charter schools succeeded where Minnesota’s failed
Each spring, Blackstone Valley Prep in Rhode Island hosts a loud, spirited and celebratory “college signing day” ceremony for its high school seniors. One by one, the teenagers step onstage to proudly announce their post-graduation plans. Many are the first in their family to seek a degree.
Rhode Island is the smallest state in the country, but it’s here — and not in Minnesota, the birthplace of the charter school movement — that this daring experiment in public school education is paying big dividends for students and their families.
Left In the 27 years since Rhode Island’s first charter school opened its doors, just one has closed. Segue Institute for Learning, a community charter in Central Falls, R.I., is among the state’s successes. It has an extraordinarily low student-to-teacher ratio of 4 to 1, even though it spends less than a typical Rhode Island school.
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Airline passenger ordered to pay thousands of dollars in fuel costs after bad behavior diverts flight
FDA approves Apple AirPods Pro 2 to be used as hearing aids
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