Star Tribune
With juveniles committing more serious crimes, these Hennepin County and state leaders are seeking new solutions
Young people in the Twin Cities are committing a growing number of severe and brazen crimes — even as the overall number of juvenile cases has receded below pre-pandemic levels.
Among the most common offenses in Hennepin County: auto thefts, gun possession, assault and robbery. Juveniles charged with homicide have more than doubled since 2021 compared with the three years prior.
“We are not talking about stealing candy bars from stores,” said Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt, who has worked closely with kids most of her career and finds the recent intensity of juvenile crimes troubling. “These are indicators that we’re in trouble.”
Witt and other local leaders are hoping some solutions to that troubling trend may come out of the work of a panel that’s been meeting at the State Capitol since this fall and will deliver its recommendations to the Legislature when it reconvenes in early 2024.
The Minnesota Legislature created the Working Group on Youth Interventions to improve how state and county agencies help young people charged with crimes.
Sen. Bobby Joe Champion, DFL-Minneapolis, was chief sponsor of the bill that created the panel to tackle an issue Hennepin County leaders have long wanted state help addressing. Its co-chair is Hennepin County Commissioner Jeffrey Lunde, and Witt is among the panel’s more than two dozen members.
The working group is part of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party-led Legislature’s response to increased crime statewide since the coronavirus pandemic upended life in 2020. Champion agrees with local leaders that the state has a responsibility to ensure local governments have the resources to help youth caught up in the criminal justice system.
“Sometimes young people make boneheaded decisions,” Champion said. “A setback can also be an opportunity for a comeback. How do we identify solutions that bring them back into law-abiding behavior?”
More serious offenses
Sheriff Witt noted that data from the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office shows the number of felonies involving juveniles has risen dramatically since the pandemic.
Since 2018, about half of the juvenile cases referred to the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office result in criminal charges. Roughly one-third of those not charged enter a diversion program, and most of the remaining cases are sent back to law enforcement for further investigation.
Witt said she is not sure why law enforcement officers are presenting fewer cases for prosecution than before the pandemic. The number of Ramsey County juvenile cases have followed a similar trend.
“We have to ask why,” Witt said, noting that a variety of factors have impacted policing in recent years. “Talk to anyone in law enforcement, we are not seeing that trend.”
The Hennepin County data also reveals a disproportionate number of juvenile cases, nearly two-thirds, involve Black youth and nearly 70% of cases involve males. About 14.5% of county residents are Black.
A fragmented system
The legislative working group is focused on youth who are already in the criminal justice system, because they’ve been convicted of a crime or entered a diversion program. Juveniles are then referred to local departments of corrections, human services or child protection.
Those agencies order therapeutic and rehabilitative interventions like counseling, in-patient mental health treatment or detention. Members of the panel say those systems need to collaborate, but struggle to do so, because of licensing differences and privacy rules.
More importantly, most communities don’t have the capacity to assist the growing number of kids who need help. Many independent providers scaled back or closed during the pandemic, and government services scattered across the state largely lack staff and resources.
That means kids in trouble may be sent hours away from their families for treatment or be stuck in a hospital or detention facility for months while they wait for a spot to open up.
“We are getting this perspective from all over the state. The needs are the same, but the scales are different,” said Lunde, who leads the Hennepin County Board Law, Safety and Justice Committee. “This is about a continuum of care.”
Panel co-chair Al Godfrey, field services director for the state Department of Corrections, says 40 years in the field taught him that juvenile justice needs to be nimble. He encouraged the panel to look beyond traditional treatment facilities and find creative ways to provide in-home or community-based mental health services.
“The corrections system was never designed to be a mental health care facility for those kids, but they are ending up there,” Godfrey said. “We don’t want to throw a lot of dollars at something that may not solve the needs of the kids in the system.”
Yet, Witt and others in law enforcement see an ongoing need for more traditional group homes and detention facilities — several of which have closed in recent years. When kids are in crisis, Witt said, sometimes the best option is to get them out of bad situations.
“Kids that are living in chaos, that are living in survival mode, how receptive are they going to be to any kind of rehabilitation?” Witt said. “We need these facilities. Bring the resources to them. It doesn’t have to be punitive.”
Finding consensus
The working group spent four meetings since September, with another scheduled Dec. 13, compiling testimony and data to better understand problems with the system. The difficult work starts in January, when the 26-member group drafts its recommendations to the Legislature and seeks state lawmakers’ support.
The Legislature reconvenes in mid-February for a session focused on infrastructure and policy changes after completing a two-year budget last May.
Sen. Warren Limmer, R-Maple Grove, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee, agrees that the state’s juvenile justice system needs improvements. But he’s disappointed the panel didn’t include members without a direct stake in the outcome.
“There is a sincere concern that stakeholders will protect their own turf,” Limmer said, noting that youth intervention programs get strong bipartisan backing. “If you want true accountability, then you need an independent party doing this analysis. We also need to have measurable goals.”
Lunde, Godfrey and Witt are optimistic the group can both find a consensus on needed changes and persuade state lawmakers to approve them. There’s a lot riding on the outcome.
“I think people are tired of a lot of talking and no action,” said Witt. “We better get it right.”
CBRE, which marketed the property, declined to comment on the sale.
Adam Duininck, president and CEO of the Minneapolis Downtown Council, said while the low sales prices might sound alarming, there are bright spots. Homeowners in the city are facing a few tough years of property tax increases as commercial values drop, he acknowledged. But the lower prices have also enabled new players to buy downtown properties, paving the way for fresh ideas to transform the urban core.
“Hopefully, they come into the market with a certain kind of energy and optimism that helps drive the market back up,” he said, adding public safety improvements have also fueled recent momentum.
Take the Kickernick Building, which recently opened an art gallery. Earlier this year, Twin Cities-based United Properties sold the historic former warehouse on the edge of the CBD for $3.79 million. In 2017, United paid $19.5 million for the building.
Just a couple blocks away, Tom McCarver and Steve Boynton bought a mixed-use, nearly 31,000-square-foot building at the corner of Seventh Street and Hennepin Avenue that most recently housed Seven Steakhouse & Sushi. Last month, they paid about $4.3 million, slightly more than half of what it sold for in November 2017.
Tom McCarver, CEO of Hennepin Real Estate Partners LLC, poses Tuesday on the rooftop of the Stimson Building in Minneapolis that formerly housed Seven Steakhouse & Sushi. (Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
After the restaurant closed during the pandemic, the building went into receivership and up for auction. McCarver and Boynton, executives at a company that owns billboards across the metro, were among nearly a dozen bidders. They won the auction in March, but because of “legal hurdles,” the sale didn’t close until last month.
A third wildfire burning within the Superior National Forest was discovered Tuesday near Bogus Lake in Cook County.
The fire, 45 acres in size, was active overnight into Wednesday as firefighters and aircraft continued suppression efforts, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The cause is unknown.
Bogus Lake is less than 20 miles northeast of Grand Marais.
A drought has put much of the upper Midwest, from northern Minnesota to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, under “above normal” conditions for potential wildland fire, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
The Bogus Lake Fire is the second wildfire to be discovered in the Superior National Forest this week and the third one actively burning since early September.
Monday, a fire was detected on the eastern side of Shell Lake, about 4 miles north of Road 116 within the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, in St. Louis County. That fire is less than one acre, with the potential to spread east near Agawato Lake and the Sioux-Hustler Hiking Trail, the Forest Service said.
That fire grew to 45 acres and half of it was contained as of Oct. 1, according to the Forest Service. It is suspected of being caused by humans. Firefighters remain assigned to the fire.
Star Tribune
Duluth man involved in chaotic aftermath of fatal stabbing turns himself in 6 months later
DULUTH – On the mid-April night that Chantel Moose was fatally stabbed outside a downtown bar, Trayvon Joseph Walters fired at least two shots toward the fleeing suspect and a man who was pistol-whipping the accused. Then Walters took off for six months.
Walters, 27, traveled back from Colorado and turned himself in to local law enforcement officials on Wednesday morning, according to his attorney, assistant public defender Aaron Haddorff. He faces charges of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon — along with unrelated charges of second-degree assault from 2020 — and appeared before Judge Eric Hylden in the afternoon at the St. Louis County Courthouse. His bail is set at $250,000.
Kimonte Travion Cadge, 26, who was taken to a hospital for the gunshot wound Walters allegedly inflicted, was charged with second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon. He was extradited from Cook County Jail in Chicago and was booked in St. Louis County Jail in September.
According to the criminal complaint: Moose and Plummer, who is friends with Moose’s ex-boyfriend, got into an argument after bar close on April 12 outside Spurs on 1st Street. A bouncer intervened, and Plummer reached over him to take a swipe at Moose with a knife with a 4- to 6-inch blade. Moose backed up and walked away before she dropped to the sidewalk.
When Plummer saw her fall, he took off running.
Cadge chased him, pistol-whipped him, then fired his gun at him. Walters, according to the criminal complaint, fired at least two shots toward both men, then left in a vehicle. Cadge retreated to a nearby apartment before he was transported to the hospital.
Moose was pronounced dead at a hospital, with a stab wound to the right side of her chest.
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