more important of today's news items. It concerns a report from the U. S.
Justice Department on Minneapolis police officers:
http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/290151541.html?page.
(If that link doesn't work: I finally found the article searching the Strib
page for Janee Harteau; searching Minneapolis Police or Justice Department
didn't work, somehow).
Here you will find that Minneapolis does, indeed, fire cops for bad
performance. A lot of them, way beyond those two Yahoos who mouthed off in
Milwaukee a year or so ago, and even with the police union. There's a
chart. Many cops have gotten reprimands, intensive coaching, bad letters in
their personnel file, etc. But our current police chief, who requested that
the U.S. Justice Department do this analytical study of what ailed our
police department just after she took the post, is determined to root out
bad behaviors. She found a non-biased, outside professional entity to do
the study.
She's going to follow the recommendations, all of them. I find that
encouraging.
Especially having just read a New Yorker article on the atrocious
conditions in Albuquerque, N.M.'s police department, where they'll hire
just about anybody, including people with criminal records, and cops
literally get away with murder all the time--not just of blacks. A
sickening level of corruption that Minneapolis's chief is trying to avoid
by being proactive.
Connie Sullivan
Como, in Southeast Minneapolis