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7 ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
8 ABBOTT NORTHWESTERN HOSPITAL
9 MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
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14 Monday, January 12, 1998
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2 PANEL MEMBERS
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4 Jan Smaby, Department of Corrections
5 Sharon Lubinski, Minneapolis Police Department
6 Janet Reno, United States Attorney General
7 David Lillehaug, U.S. Attorney
8 Rod Wooten, West Broadway Business Association
9 Randy Johnson, Minneapolis Police Department
10 Pat Hoven, Honeywell Corporation
11 Chuck Wexler, Police Executive Research Forum
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2 MR. LILLEHAUG: We'll be introducing
3 the Attorney General in a little bit and I'm
4 sure we'll give her a warm Minnesota welcome on
5 this day, but first I would like to introduce
6 Doctor Gordon Sprenger, Mr. Gordon Sprenger, who
7 is the executive officer of Allina Health
8 Systems.
9 MR. SPRENGER: Thank you very much,
10 United States Attorney General Lillehaug. Let
11 me add my welcome to you, Attorney General Reno,
12 not only to sunny Minneapolis-St. Paul and
13 Minnesota. She indicated she left some very
14 warm weather in Washington, D.C. We wish you
15 would have brought a little of that along with
16 you, but this is part of Minnesota that you're
17 experiencing today, but also to welcome you here
18 to Abbott Northwestern Hospital, where this
19 forum is being held today.
20 It is particularly appropriate, I
21 think, that this setting is in this
22 neighborhood, where you would choose to meet
23 with us, representing healthcare, government,
24 corporate leaders, city and county officials
25 and, most importantly, the people who reside in
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1 the neighborhood themselves.
2 As someone who works for a healthcare
3 system, we see the tragic results of violence
4 all too often. In the past, we approached the
5 results of violence as a healthcare issue mostly
6 as it related to how do we put you back together
7 again and send you back into the community or
8 the same environment in which the violence
9 occurred.
10 Many people ask the question, Attorney
11 General, why would a healthcare system be
12 concerned about violence? Let me give you three
13 quick stories that hopefully will bring the
14 realities of violence and its affects on
15 healthcare.
16 Several years ago, with a neighborhood
17 healthcare worker, in one of our public parks,
18 we approached a young women, whose child was
19 playing in the park, with the intent to discuss
20 how we could improve the immunization rates of
21 the children in the neighborhood.
22 I will never forget when the mother
23 looked at me and said, "My first concern is that
24 when the park supervisor blows a whistle, that
25 my child knows that she goes down on all fours
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1 because that whistle means that there is a gun
2 in the park.
3 "Right now, Mr. Sprenger," she told
4 me, "I'm only trying to keep my child alive.
5 It's hard to for me to think about immunization
6 that will keep my child healthy for a normal
7 lifetime."
8 Recently, we put a large billboard up
9 within our community which was emphasizing the
10 point that had as its message, "With routine
11 maintenance, that body could last you a
12 lifetime." And, obviously, it was depicting a
13 very healthy individual.
14 I remember getting a phone call
15 indicating that some graffiti had been used on
16 one of our big billboards that delivered this
17 message. The message that was left after the
18 graffiti was that "Without violence, that body
19 could last you a lifetime."
20 And the question was asked of me, did I
21 want the billboard taken down. And after
22 reflecting on that, I thought we, as a health
23 system, went out to take a message to the
24 community and we got a very important message
25 back. No, leave that billboard up as a constant
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1 reminder.
2 Thirdly, Attorney General Reno, we have
3 a program within our hospital in which we take
4 tatoos off of gang members; that through the
5 park departments and the police departments,
6 they're able to counsel the young man or women
7 into leaving a gang.
8 As most of us know, gang members have
9 tatoos that are evidence that can be easily seen
10 as a way of identifying them as part of that
11 gang. They could not afford to take off those
12 tatoos if they wanted to leave the gang. We use
13 our laser center and some volunteer
14 dermatologists to take off those tatoos.
15 Is that an appropriate use of
16 healthcare resources? We believe it is.
17 Because if you went into the emergency room, you
18 would see the results of the violence and the
19 cost to the healthcare system that doesn't allow
20 us to allocate those precious healthcare dollars
21 for appropriate prenatal care, for immunization
22 programs, for chronic illness or other
23 tremendous healthcare needs within our
24 community.
25 I hope that these short stories help
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1 share why we, as a healthcare system, in
2 partnership with all segments of our community,
3 are addressing this very important issue of
4 violence. If our citizens do not have a safe
5 place in which to live, able to have a job that
6 pays at a level that they can take care of their
7 families by putting food on the table, and
8 appropriate housing in which to live in, just
9 basic needs, it's very difficult for us to deal
10 with the health status of the community in which
11 we live.
12 You honor all of us, Attorney General
13 Reno, by your presence today and through your
14 attendance gives us encouragement that the path
15 we are following in close partnership, both
16 public and private, is the only way that these
17 problems are going to be addressed in a
18 meaningful way.
19 With the private and public sectors
20 working together closely with the communities
21 and the neighbors and the neighborhoods in which
22 we are all a part of, we truly do believe that
23 we can make a move upstream and ultimately
24 develop healthier communities in which we can
25 live and work.
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1 Thank you again for joining us.
2 At this time I would like to introduce
3 Jim Porter, who's chief administrative officer
4 of Honeywell, one of our main partners in this
5 effort.
6 MR. PORTER: Thank you, Gordon.
7 Attorney General Reno, it certainly is
8 my pleasure to also welcome you to Minneapolis,
9 sunny Minneapolis most of the time anyway, and
10 it's also my pleasure to have this opportunity
11 along with several other of our colleagues here
12 to tell you more about Minnesota HEALS.
13 Mike Bonsignore, Honeywell's chairman
14 and CEO, along with Gordon Sprenger from Allina,
15 helped to begin this dialogue and it's lead to a
16 statewide anticrime issue. Other corporations
17 in the community have also risen to the
18 challenge and join these efforts. General Mills
19 and 3M, just to name a couple.
20 Mike was extremely disappointed that he
21 couldn't be here today to personally express his
22 pride in all that's been accomplished already
23 through Minnesota HEALS and to express his faith
24 that in the coming months and years we are going
25 to continue to make significant progress.
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1 He also asked me to give you his
2 personal thanks for the pivotal role that the
3 U.S. Government has played in making this
4 initiative successful. This truly demonstrates
5 the power of partnership.
6 Honeywell is a company with its roots,
7 its headquarters and more than 7000 employees in
8 the Twin Cities area. It was born 113 years ago
9 in Minneapolis, not far from where our world
10 headquarters sits today, just a few blocks from
11 here, and right in the heart of what's known as
12 the Phillips neighborhood.
13 We remain committed today to the Twin
14 Cities and to the Phillips neighborhood and to
15 being a positive force in this community because
16 we believe that strong companies need strong
17 communities in order to grow and to prosper.
18 As a corporation, we have a tremendous
19 stake in making our neighborhood a better place
20 to live and to work. We have a responsibility
21 to our employees to ensure that they feel safe
22 when they come to work, to ensure that they feel
23 safe when they leave the building, and to ensure
24 that they feel safe when they drive through the
25 neighborhoods around our facilities.
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1 We have to be able to attract new
2 employees to come and work and live in this
3 community. And last, but certainly not least,
4 we want our residential neighbors to feel safe
5 in their homes and on their streets. That's our
6 motivation for being a part of Minnesota HEALS.
7 From a handful of people that were
8 concerned about crime, Minnesota HEALS has
9 grown, as Gordon alluded to, into a strong
10 working coalition of widely varied groups from
11 government, from law enforcement, corporations
12 in the community, all with one common vision,
13 creating hope and reducing violence.
14 Again, thank you for your personal
15 support and for that of your agency. With that,
16 I would like to introduce Senator Paul
17 Wellstone. (Applause).
18 MR. WELLSTONE: We've got a really
19 great pal, and I know we want to hear from the
20 Attorney General, so I'm going to limit my
21 remarks to an hour or so and then we'll
22 (laughter) -- some do believe me too.
23 To Honeywell and Allina, thank you for
24 your commitment to the partnership work with
25 Minnesota HEALS; to colleagues that are here,
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1 there are a lot of different colleagues that are
2 here. All of us, I think, are colleagues.
3 I see the Attorney General here,
4 Humphrey; and I see our Hennepin County
5 Attorney, Mike Freeman, here; my colleague, Jim
6 Ramstad. Things are so interconnected, I'm
7 going to become very committed to working with
8 Jim on substance abuse parity to make sure
9 there's some treatment for people, all of which
10 is quite connected to how we reduce violence in
11 homes and communities.
12 I also would like to thank our U.S.
13 Attorney, Dave Lillehaug. I had the honor of
14 being able to recommend him to the President,
15 and I think that David has been a really strong
16 leader in our state.
17 And what I'm most impressed about is
18 the way in which he has really used this office
19 to really connect the people at the neighborhood
20 level. I'm sure people that are here in the
21 neighborhood community level would say, "Look,
22 that's going to be key to it," and I would
23 thank him for the very strong leadership.
24 By way of the briefest possible
25 introduction to our Attorney General, let me
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1 thank you first of all, Madam Attorney General,
2 for your commitment to the community police
3 program. I see Chief Finney hear and Chief
4 Olson here.
5 We're really proud of the work that
6 we've done, and in many ways, Attorney General
7 Reno, I think this should be a model for a lot
8 of what we do at the federal level. It's a
9 one-page form, am I right, everybody? One page,
10 right, Chief?
11 And the money goes directly, really, at
12 the community level, it's not centralized, it's
13 not bureaucratized, and we're doing a lot of, I
14 think, really positive, exciting things by way
15 of law enforcement, and the people that are
16 doing it are right there down in the trenches.
17 It has really worked well.
18 Let me also thank you on behalf of
19 Jill, who is not here with me, for your
20 commitment to reduce violence at home, dealing
21 with domestic violence. You have been a very,
22 very key leader in our country.
23 And finally, and most importantly, on a
24 personal note, let me just say to the Attorney
25 General, you are in a state that values
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1 integrity and values quiet dignity, and you
2 represent that as well as anybody in public
3 office anywhere in the United States of
4 America. We are blessed by your presence
5 today. Thank you. (Applause).
6 MR. RAMSTAD: I too want to thank you,
7 Attorney General Reno, for being here today and
8 for your dedicated, effective leadership. Thank
9 you also for calling my sister, Cheryl Ramstad
10 Hvas, who's here today, as president of the
11 Minnesota State Bar Association, for your call
12 Friday.
13 Attorney General Reno is the only
14 cabinet officer that I've known, four terms in
15 Congress, who calls people personally, who flies
16 on commercial aircraft, who works seven days a
17 week in her office.
18 In fact, the first time she called my
19 office, we were working together in 1993 in
20 putting together the federal crime bill, and she
21 said to my intern, who answered the phone, "This
22 is Attorney General Reno," and my intern
23 responded, "Yeah, sure." (Laughter) well,
24 we've got many of those calls.
25 As chairman of the house law
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1 enforcement caucus, it has been a real pleasure
2 to work with you, Attorney General Reno, since
3 '93, and getting that federal support of our
4 local police and our communities and
5 neighborhoods and the other federal initiatives
6 that we've worked together in a bipartisan
7 pragmatic way to achieve.
8 Over the past 12 years, I spent 1600
9 hours riding dogwatch and powershift with
10 Minneapolis and suburban cops, I have been with
11 the high risk entry team on 65 warrants, so I've
12 seen firsthand the human impact of crime on
13 people. I've seen the terror in the eyes of
14 those children in those crack houses, I've held
15 trembling crack cocaine-addicted babies in my
16 arms.
17 Over the past couple years, I've seen
18 new hope. I've seen the federal agents joining
19 our local officers and task forces to bust crack
20 houses. I've ridden with ATF agents and
21 Minneapolis police here at 3s, the Third
22 Precinct. I've seen more drug dealers going to
23 federal court and facing mandatory and longer
24 prison sentences. I've seen local and federal
25 officials working together on gun cases and
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1 gangs being nabbed for trafficking instead of
2 one suspect being arrested for one gun.
3 But most importantly, I've seen the
4 people of our community mobilize in the broadest
5 possible way to reduce violence, also to restore
6 hope and a safer future. I've seen community,
7 corporate, government and law enforcement
8 leaders come together to form this inspiring and
9 promising coalition, Minnesota HEALS, a
10 long-term commitment, that is already making a
11 difference right here in the Phillips
12 neighborhood.
13 I want to thank you, all you law
14 enforcement people here today, for your efforts
15 in this coalition, thank you Allina, and
16 Honeywell, and 3M, and Hennepin County, and the
17 Stair Step Foundation, General Mills, the
18 Minneapolis Foundation, Minneapolis city and
19 park board officials, and many, many others who
20 are part of this important coalition.
21 You recognize that not only must we
22 provide greater support to law enforcement, but
23 that the keys to dealing with violence and crime
24 are education, jobs, better healthcare,
25 treatment for chemically dependent people like
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1 me, and mentoring.
2 All of those are important. And a
3 comprehensive approach to dealing with crime and
4 violence, working together in a bipartisan,
5 pragmatic and cooperative way, just as we've
6 done, Attorney General Reno, in Washington, you
7 are making a difference in the lives of real
8 people.
9 Now, it's too late -- it's too late to
10 save Byron Phillips or Divicia Gillen. Byron,
11 who was shot down at eleven years of age, and
12 Divicia, who lost her life to gunfire at age
13 four; but, overall, there is hope. Homicides in
14 Minneapolis are down, gun crimes in the Twin
15 Cities area, including our suburban area, are
16 down. So, the message is clear. When we all
17 work together in a public and private
18 partnership, we can build a safer community.
19 I just want to close by mentioning a
20 follow-up to what my colleague Paul Wellstone
21 mentioned. We are working together on the
22 Substance Abuse Parity Act. This is the year
23 that, with your support, people like you across
24 America, we are going to pass this important
25 life-saving legislation.
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1 Attorney General Reno, last Friday,
2 when your visit was announced on the front page
3 of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, opposite that
4 column, that story, was a very important column
5 citing the recent study by Columbia University's
6 Center for Substance Abuse Treatment which
7 showed empirically what all of you here,
8 certainly all of you law enforcement people know
9 by experience, that 80 percent of all crimes are
10 tied directly or indirectly to drug and alcohol
11 abuse.
12 That's why the legislation that Paul
13 Wellstone and I have introduced is absolutely
14 important to break down the barriers so that
15 more people have the opportunity that I had to
16 get into treatment. We need greater access to
17 treatment, not only to combat alcoholism and
18 drug addiction, but to save healthcare dollars
19 and reduce crime in the long run.
20 So, thank you again, Attorney General
21 Reno, thank you, all of you who are Minnesota
22 HEALS, thank you to the law enforcement officers
23 who are on the front lines each and every day,
24 let's continue to work together to assure that
25 no child -- no child, no neighborhood and no
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1 community is without hope. Thank you.
2 (Applause).
3 MR. LILLEHAUG: Thank you, Senator
4 Wellstone, Congressman Ramstad, and the others
5 of you who have welcomed the Attorney General.
6 We have a number of public officials here
7 today.
8 I recognize them not only because they
9 are public officials, but have been an integral
10 part of the Minnesota HEALS effort. I would
11 like to introduce them, ask you to stand, and
12 please hold your applause until the
13 introductions are finished.
14 We have our two leading law enforcement
15 officials at the state level today, Minnesota
16 Attorney General Hubert H. Humphrey, the Third,
17 and Public Safety Commissioner Don Davis. Also
18 Superintendent of the Bureau of Criminal
19 Apprehension Nick O'Hara.
20 We have state Senator -- or state
21 representative Wes Skoglund, who heads the
22 judiciary committee. At the county level,
23 Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman. And I
24 might as well introduce two people who may wish
25 to succeed him, Amy Klobuchar and Cheryl Ramstad
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1 Hvas. You know you're doing well when they're
2 lining up. (Laughter).
3 Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner,
4 Hennepin County Sheriff Pat McGowan, three
5 Hennepin County Commissioners, Penny Steele,
6 Mark Stenglein and Peter McLaughlin. And at the
7 city level, city council members Brian Herron,
8 Jim Niland, and I understand today, because the
9 mayor and the council president are out of town,
10 council member Joe Biernat is acting mayor, so
11 we welcome you, Mr. Mayor. (Laughter).
12 At the federal level, John Hancock,
13 special agent in charge of the FBI, Pat Doman,
14 resident agent in charge of the DEA, Kelvin
15 Crenshaw, group supervisor of the ATF.
16 I left out another city official, St.
17 Paul Police Chief William Finney, and the
18 commander of the Minnesota Gang Strike Force,
19 the new law enforcement entity, Ron Ryan, and I
20 have saved for last our Minneapolis police
21 chief. The good news is that he was reappointed
22 to a new three-year term the other day. Chief
23 Robert Olson. (Laughter).
24 Would you welcome these officials.
25 (Applause).
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1 And there are a variety of people from
2 neighborhood organizations, block clubs and
3 other entities, and I apologize for having to
4 limit the introductions.
5 We are here to celebrate Minnesota
6 HEALS and the reduction in the Minnesota
7 homicide rate of 33 percent in 1997. Our
8 vehicle for that celebration is twofold, a panel
9 discussion of people who have been involved in
10 the HEALS effort and then responsive remarks by
11 the Attorney General of the United States.
12 I use the word "celebration" carefully
13 today, because certainly the reduction in
14 homicides and firearms crimes in Minneapolis is
15 something to celebrate, but I emphasize that we
16 have made some progress, with emphasis on the
17 word "some," because our other levels of crime,
18 including drug dealing, burglaries and so on,
19 are at about the same level from 1996 to 1997.
20 And the question today is whether we
21 can take this model of public-private
22 partnership with the private sector involved in
23 the best tradition of Minnesota corporate
24 responsibility and use it to attack other kinds
25 of crimes, so it is a celebration and a
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1 challenge today.
2 And to discuss that celebration and
3 challenge, going from your left to right, we
4 have Jan Smaby, who is the Director of the
5 Department of Community Corrections in Hennepin
6 County, whose probation officers were very much
7 involved in the Minnesota HEALS effort; Sharon
8 Lubinski, inspector of the downtown command of
9 the Minneapolis Police Department, who was the
10 police department's primary person on the HEALS
11 initiative, and along with Pat Hoven, who I will
12 now skip down to the end, vice-president of
13 Honeywell, worked very closely together to put
14 this initiative together.
15 I will introduce the Attorney General
16 momentarily. After her is Rod Wooten, who is
17 with the West Broadway Business Association in
18 north Minneapolis, and then, finally, Lieutenant
19 Randy Johnson. He is now the head of the
20 Minneapolis Police Department's homicide unit
21 but during the summer was the head of the
22 organized crime unit, also known as the gang
23 unit, and he'll have some interesting stories to
24 tell you about the summer's activity, I'm sure.
25 And to moderate our panel discussion,
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1 we have an outsider. It was important to the
2 Minnesota HEALS effort that we bring in somebody
3 who had no particular connections to any of the
4 players, who could tell it like it is, and
5 believe me, he did so, for each participant in
6 the HEALS effort. He is the executive director
7 of the prestigious Police Executive Research
8 Forum from Washington, D.C., Chuck Wexler, who
9 will moderate our discussion today.
10 MR. WEXLER: Prestigious, huh? I like
11 that. Well, this really is Minnesota, I'll tell
12 you, we've got everyone here and it's great to
13 be here, it's great to have the Attorney General
14 of the United States come see something you've
15 done. We're very honored by that. You are a
16 busy person and to be here today means a lot to
17 all of us.
18 So, I'm going to walk around here a
19 little bit and I'm going to try to get our panel
20 to tell a story, if you will, because rather
21 than just hear from six people, we're going to
22 try to weave the story and tell it as we did,
23 and we did this in San Diego, so this was like
24 Off Broadway. We're on Broadway now, we're back
25 home, so it's good to be home.
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1 And we don't have a lot of time so I'm
2 going to do my typical Northeast brusque type
3 and cut people off when they start to go off a
4 little bit too far. So, first, let's set the
5 scene if we could, Inspector Lubinski.
6 Inspector Lubinski, when she started this
7 project, was a Lieutenant and was given this
8 responsibility by Chief Olson to work with
9 Wexler, work with Wexler and let's do
10 something.
11 And so, Sharon, tell us a little bit
12 about what was going on in Minneapolis in 1994,
13 '95 and '96.
14 MS. LUBINSKI: Just one moment of
15 logistics while I come over to the overhead.
16 Good morning everyone. For those of
17 you who work at the hospital and come to work
18 here every day, for those of you who live in the
19 neighborhood and live in the city of Minneapolis
20 as I do, you know what the problem was. A year
21 ago you knew exactly what the problem was.
22 It's violence in our neighborhood, it's
23 violence in our city, and you didn't have to
24 tell anyone in the neighborhoods or any one of
25 those officers out on the street what the
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1 problem was. There was a lot of violence.
2 For a number of years, Minneapolis went
3 along at about 58 homicides a year, 60, 62.
4 Suddenly, in 1995, something surfaced that was
5 alarming to everyone, alarming to the officer in
6 the squad car, alarming to the people in
7 Minneapolis, alarming to people not just in
8 Minneapolis but the surrounding areas.
9 And we had a record homicide year in
10 1995. We had 97 homicides. 97 homicides after
11 running along at about 60. The following year,
12 1996, 86 homicides. It was a reduction but
13 still way above anything that we had normally
14 seen.
15 So, about a year ago, Chief Olson
16 called me into his office. It always kind of
17 piques your attention when the chief calls you
18 in. He says, "I have a little project for
19 you."
20 Well, anyway, about a year ago, the
21 panel members that are before you and actually a
22 number of people that are in the audience that
23 were introduced were all pulled together and
24 said, "We have this problem and we have to be
25 ready for summer, we have to do something about
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1 it, it can't be business as usual."
2 So, without belaboring what the problem
3 was, I want to take just a moment and talk about
4 exactly what we did. We decided to pull apart
5 that problem, to look more deeply into the
6 problem and do sort of the typical cop thing
7 where you do the who, what, when, how, where and
8 why and those kinds of things, so we did an
9 in-depth analysis of homicides in Minneapolis
10 starting in 1994, which was our base year, the
11 last year we had what I would -- I'm going to
12 use this in quotes, a typical year of the number
13 of homicides, and then looked at the homicides
14 1994 as our base year, '95 the record year, and
15 '96, and then up through -- you'll see the
16 numbers in the overheads, it goes up to May 24,
17 1997, because, as Chuck has mentioned, we needed
18 to be ready to go, we needed to be in the
19 starting block beginning June 1 because, again,
20 anyone in the neighborhoods and the officers
21 know that, in summertime, that's when things get
22 most violent in Minnesota.
23 So, what we did is, our analysis was
24 all geared towards what we need to be ready to
25 do in the summer of 1997. I'm going to take one
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1 moment here.
2 What I've got before you, and I've
3 blocked out part of this because it includes the
4 part of the year of 1997, is, you can see here
5 in 1994 we had our typically -- or more typical
6 number of homicides and then the numbers go
7 practically off the charts in 1995 and, again, a
8 large number of homicides in 1996, and I think
9 visually this is a good thing to show because it
10 shows you just the proportionate increase that
11 we were faced with at that particular time.
12 And then, the last bar graph is that
13 the numbers in 1997 are just simply through the
14 end of May of this past year. And again, right
15 now, all I'm really talking about is the
16 research that we did about a year ago now and
17 through the spring of 1997 to show us where we
18 need to go with the resources that we've got in
19 Minneapolis.
20 This next overhead that I want to show
21 you is, this gave us a target time during which
22 we need to be ready to go in terms of having a
23 strategy, having a focus for law enforcement
24 resources. As you can see, in July and August,
25 through the years of the study that we looked
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1 at, we had practically 25 percent of our
2 homicides in the summer months of July and
3 August. So, if we weren't ready to go with
4 something new, we were not going to be ready to
5 approach the problem in the way that it needed
6 to be approached.
7 There were two things that the homicide
8 study really, really wanted to look at. It
9 addressed two questions. First of all, whether
10 or not -- whether there was a connection between
11 gangs and homicides and, again, I could ask just
12 about any number of people in the room and you'd
13 say yes, there is a connection between gangs and
14 homicides, but I think when you're going to go
15 forward with a push like this, I think you need
16 to have your foundation of data, and so we
17 wanted to look at all the homicides, take them
18 apart and say how many were gang related in the
19 city of Minneapolis.
20 Second of all, we also wanted to know
21 the degree of prior criminal involvement by both
22 victims and perpetrators of homicides. We'll
23 discuss some of the exact findings a little bit
24 later, but there was some indication from the
25 gang unit that had already done a lot of good
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1 groundwork in this that a number of the victims
2 involved in the gang-related homicides had
3 perhaps been witnesses in prior homicides, or
4 somehow connected in other ways, so we knew
5 there was a small group that was causing us a
6 lot of problems.
7 So those were the two main goals of the
8 homicide study. I have just two overheads in
9 terms of the main findings of that study. In
10 terms of the homicide victims, many, the
11 majority of the homicide victims as well as the
12 arrestees were from the African American
13 community.
14 There is also an important youth part
15 to this in that there was a substantial number
16 of victims and arrestees that were very young of
17 age. These victims, and particularly the
18 arrestees, were carrying firearms. For the most
19 part, semiautomatics.
20 This was the area where, when we called
21 in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,
22 which we can discuss a little bit later, that's
23 where we needed to -- we started to draw in more
24 and more federal agents because we knew we
25 needed to go after firearms.
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1 And finally, again, for those of you in
2 Phillips, for those of you in Powderhorn and
3 Hawthorne neighborhoods, you know that,
4 unfortunately, that's where many of the
5 homicides were concentrated in your
6 neighborhoods, and the study bore that out.
7 And the final overhead that I have, and
8 this is the information that truly gave us
9 direction in terms of where to put law
10 enforcement, where to put probation resources.
11 Many of the victims, many of the arrestees,
12 shared a similar arrest history especially in
13 those gang-related homicides.
14 There was an astonishing number of
15 prior arrests for victims in those gang-related
16 homicides, and Jan Smaby can discuss this later
17 on, but also there was a significant probation
18 connection which then told us that we then had a
19 mechanism to use to gain some sort of control
20 over some of the suspects that we had in some of
21 the homicides and, again, the arrest histories
22 was significant in all of that.
23 MR. WEXLER: Thank you, Inspector.
24 Now, Randy Johnson, at the time, you
25 were head of the organized crime division, the
30
1 gang unit. Give us a flavor for -- you know,
2 you probably knew most of what the inspector
3 just said, but what was it like from your
4 perspective back in those years?
5 MR. JOHNSON: Well, I also got an
6 invitation to the chief's office and he made
7 sure that I knew I didn't need a pencil and
8 paper, it wasn't going to take that long.
9 (Laughter).
10 Basically, the direction was, we know
11 that there's homicidal violence happening in
12 Minneapolis, most of it is weapon and firearm
13 related, we have to do something to stop the
14 retaliation. That's one area in this kind of
15 violence that we may have an impact on trying to
16 stop the retaliation.
17 So, in the organized crime unit, we
18 took the information that we had, we went
19 through every homicide, every shooting case from
20 1995 and '96, and we did a link analysis. We
21 looked at the common denominators; people,
22 sometimes the locations, sometimes other
23 information in the reports that could give us --
24 show us a pattern of not only where these things
25 were happening but who was involved either as
31
1 peripheral people or directly involved.
2 And also, the information that
3 Inspector Lubinski studied later determined
4 which was the most dangerous time of the day,
5 which was the most dangerous time of the day of
6 the week and the location, so on and so forth,
7 and we came up with some very interesting
8 results.
9 We found that there was a relatively
10 small group of people who were active in the
11 horrendous amounts of violent crime against not
12 only the people that they knew, but innocent
13 victims, and we set out to do what we could do
14 to make it known to these people in a very
15 professional way that the entire weight of the
16 criminal justice system was going to come down
17 upon them should there be a continuation of
18 these retaliatory crimes.
19 MR. WEXLER: Okay. I'm listening to
20 this and it seems pretty, you know, intuitive,
21 but, Pat Hoven, from Honeywell, now why is
22 Honeywell even interested in this? You're a
23 vice-president of Honeywell, you're not involved
24 in crime. Why is it -- go ahead and tell us
25 about it, why is the corporate sector so
32
1 interested in this?
2 MS. HOVEN: Corporations cannot be
3 profitable in communities that don't work, and I
4 believe we are very fortunate in this community
5 to have 15 Fortune 500 companies as well as
6 many, many other corporations who for years and
7 years and years, and foundations, have been
8 involved in trying to solve community problems.
9 In 1996, there seemed to be a
10 heightened interest and awareness that our
11 community was at risk. We were finding there
12 were shooting incidents around Honeywell's
13 corporate headquarters, and for those of you who
14 don't know, we are only a few blocks down the
15 street.
16 We did an employee survey and found
17 that their concern about driving to and from
18 work had the most negative response of any
19 question on the survey. We were feeling our
20 community was somewhat at risk.
21 Our CEO was traveling around the
22 country and he came back and said, "Wherever I
23 go, people are saying, 'what is happening in the
24 Twin Cities?' You used to be able to sell
25 quality of life. You sure can't sell weather,
33
1 you sure can't sell mountains and water, but you
2 used to be able to sell a good community.
3 What's happening?"
4 And the murder rate was actually
5 starting to affect recruitment. We hear
6 anecdotal stories about people wanting to come
7 to the Twin Cities and then turning down jobs
8 because of what was happening. So our CEO said
9 to some of us, "What are we going to do about
10 this?"
11 So, Andre Lewis, who is one of my
12 colleagues, and I went around and we did about
13 30 interviews and we said, "What do you see as
14 the problem? What can be done about it and what
15 can business do to help?"
16 We got some ideas. The governor
17 actually suggested that we hire consultants, one
18 that wasn't involved in our immediate problems,
19 somebody who had been around, so we brought in
20 Chuck and sat down -- it was not a very big
21 group to start with -- to develop a plan and we
22 really said this is a two-track plan, two-track
23 system.
24 Yes, we have to deal with the immediate
25 guns, gangs, drugs, law enforcement issues, but
34
1 we also believe, for the viability of the
2 community, we have to deal with long-term
3 solutions such as education, housing, jobs and
4 training, parks systems, school start times, all
5 kinds of things that affect crime in different
6 ways than the immediate getting at the gang
7 members.
8 So, we did this two-track system and we
9 have been meeting now for a year and really have
10 made, I think, some significant results. Now,
11 we'll get back to some of the things that we've
12 done on this two-track system, some of it
13 non-law enforcement pieces after, but I think
14 that was kind of the background of how we got
15 all this going.
16 MR. WEXLER: All right. Give us some
17 perspective from the community because, you
18 know, I listen to this, all of these law
19 enforcement people, private sector, where is the
20 community coming from on this? Where is the
21 community perspective?
22 MR. WOOTEN: We are in partnership with
23 the law enforcement perspective, Chuck, so from
24 the community's perspective, my organization,
25 which is the West Broadway Business Association,
35
1 has been an intricate part of the community
2 since 1942. That's 55 years of commitment.
3 And it was about four years ago that we
4 actually got together as businesses, social
5 services agencies and nonprofit organizations
6 and determined that we needed to make an
7 investment back into the community that was a
8 part of what we were about and it was due to
9 this investment that we decided to focus on four
10 areas; public safety, commercial viability,
11 community ownership and youth development and
12 employment.
13 And it's that last one, youth
14 development and employment, we feel is very
15 significant to the direction and the emphasis of
16 Minnesota HEALS and the fact that the HEALS
17 stands for hope, education, law and safety.
18 We're very, very committed to the fact that
19 investment is very critical.
20 In fact, we have in the last four years
21 raised close to half a million dollars that we
22 reinvested in projects and initiatives right
23 back into the community. I could talk a little
24 bit later about significantly how that
25 partnership and how that effort had paid off,
36
1 but that's kind of why we were involved.
2 MR. WEXLER: Okay. So, now we've got
3 the problem identified, we got all the people at
4 the table; but, you know, a lot of times you
5 have a lot of people at the table and things
6 still don't work right.
7 I'm going to turn to Dave Lillehaug. I
8 want you to refresh everyone's memory, if you
9 will. What were those early meetings like?
10 You've got a bunch of people in the room, a
11 bunch of law enforcement people. Did all the
12 law enforcement people get along okay?
13 MR. LILLEHAUG: They were meetings from
14 hell. (Laughter) Caused in part by you, Chuck.
15 (Laughter).
16 In Minnesota, we've had long and strong
17 tradition of law enforcement agencies working
18 together, but this was a crisis, and at that
19 point, considerations of turf, at which level of
20 government you're a part of, really had to go
21 out the window, but it took some people a little
22 while.
23 And one good thing about having Chuck
24 Wexler come in from Washington is that he could
25 get in people's faces and he could say, "Now,
37
1 what is your commitment today to reduce gang
2 violence in Minnesota, what is your agency going
3 to do?"
4 And if there was any hemming or hawing,
5 then, he'd be right back in your face and say,
6 "Okay, now, how many cases are you going to
7 generate, how many probation visits are you
8 going to have," and so on and so forth, just to
9 take some examples.
10 And that was very important because we
11 were being Minnesota nice to each other, but
12 Minnesota nice wasn't the way to deal with
13 gangs. We were behind the curve in dealing with
14 gangs. For a period of time we denied their
15 existence, then we talked about how gang leaders
16 could be legitimate community leaders, which was
17 silly, and it took the death of officer Jerry
18 Haff not far from here and the conviction of
19 Vicelord leader Sharif Willis to drive home to
20 everybody what gangs are doing to our community
21 and now we in law enforcement had to respond.
22 We should have responded a lot earlier,
23 but through this Minnesota HEALS process and
24 Chuck, and that kind of work, we started to make
25 some progress in these meetings.
38
1 MR. WEXLER: Well, let's get specific
2 here and let's talk to my friend Jan Smaby,
3 okay? Police and probation, did they work well
4 together?
5 MS. SMABY: No, they didn't. I think
6 there was both a combination of ignorance and
7 some distrust. Part of that was born from the
8 fact of in recent years, in the last decade or
9 so, the volume of offenders that both police and
10 then corrections has had to deal with had
11 mushroomed so.
12 On any given day in Hennepin County,
13 our corrections department has over 26,000
14 offenders under our jurisdiction and we have
15 about 200 probation officers. So, deciding not
16 only where to allocate those resources, but I
17 think just dealing with that volume,
18 interestingly enough, made us a little more
19 inward as opposed to reaching outward.
20 The initial meetings were from hell.
21 That's well put, David. But I think they also
22 were very helpful as we were starting to test
23 one another and see how can we come to trust one
24 another and yet respect one another's role.
25 When I was asked to be a part of this
39
1 -- by the way, the chief was kind enough not to
2 summon me to his office, he came with you all to
3 see me, so it was hard to say no, and I had
4 strong support from my county board of
5 commissioners, who basically were saying do
6 whatever it takes.
7 But when we were initially approached,
8 Chuck, I think we recognized two things. Number
9 one, probation officers and police officers have
10 both different authorities and different
11 responsibilities and we wanted those to
12 complement one another.
13 I didn't want probation officers
14 thinking they were becoming cops and I think
15 cops certainly didn't necessarily want to think
16 that they were going to become probation
17 officers. It took us, I think, a few weeks and
18 a few months to understand those roles and then
19 to gain trust and begin to work together. Now
20 it's working beautifully.
21 MR. WEXLER: But talk a little bit
22 about, you know, what does it mean, work
23 together? Why -- let's be strategic here. What
24 did we want you to do and what did you all do to
25 get prepared for implementing this? Remember,
40
1 we talked -- this is just about a year ago at
2 this time and we said we wanted to have
3 something in place by June 1.
4 MS. SMABY: Yes. You wanted us out
5 there yesterday, Chuck, that's what you wanted.
6 That's where you and I would have our fights.
7 Probation officers, first and foremost
8 for us, we had to make sure they had adequate
9 training, particularly around the issue of
10 safety. And what we were doing and what we
11 continue to do, this very night for example, we
12 will be going out and doing this, we're sending
13 probation officers out with members of the
14 organized crime unit, the gang unit as we know
15 it, to make visits, and we call it soft entry
16 visits, into the homes of selected probationers
17 whom both the police and we in probation had
18 identified as being relatively high risk. We
19 knew for a fact of their involvement in
20 gang-related activity or having a history of
21 violence.
22 The purpose of our visits was then and
23 continues to be severalfold. Number one, to
24 spread a message of no violence and, indeed,
25 when we make these visits into the home, we
41
1 share with the individual that "We know who you
2 are, we are here, not just downtown, we are in
3 your home, we are checking to see how things are
4 going and we want you to know that if you are
5 involved in any violent activity, we will bring
6 the full force of not just state but also
7 federal government down upon you."
8 MR. WEXLER: Okay. Let me go now to a
9 specific example which I think, Lieutenant, is
10 the turning point, because all of this sounds
11 like rhetoric and this was a see change, talk
12 about the incident, the hospital and so forth
13 and that, from your perspective, what came out
14 of that. Do you know what I'm referring to?
15 MR. JOHNSON: Just to emphasize what
16 Jan Smaby just mentioned, one thing that a
17 criminal gang member or any practicing criminal
18 really does not want is personalized attention,
19 and whether it's from law enforcement or
20 probation or the court system, they just really
21 don't want that personal visitation every so
22 often, so we made a point of talking to people.
23 And it's really not a novel concept,
24 but we actually told them, "Don't, don't do
25 this. Stop. We're going to stop this killing.
42
1 We're trying to save people here. Yeah, you may
2 end up going to jail for a long time;" but,
3 basically, "We know who you are, we know where
4 you live, we know what kind of a car you drive,
5 we know where you're supposed to be, we know who
6 you hang out with," and we tried to give special
7 attention to people that needed it.
8 And the end of May, May 31st of 1997,
9 there was a series of incidents that took place
10 in north Minneapolis which began with a nonfatal
11 shooting of a person at a filling station on
12 Broadway. Throughout the course of the evening,
13 officers from the gang unit and the Fourth
14 Precinct, I think some of them were on
15 Lieutenant Stanick's shift of the Fourth
16 Precinct, made some visits throughout the
17 precinct.
18 We talked to some people who we
19 suspected were involved in this shooting
20 incident or had knowledge of it. We even went
21 to the hospital and specifically met with the
22 victim of the shooting and his associates and
23 told them the same message that we have been
24 giving everybody else, do not retaliate or the
25 entire weight of the system will fall on your
43
1 shoulders.
2 Well, sure enough, these people didn't
3 take it to heart so, later on in the morning,
4 there was a drive-by shooting incident at an
5 address in north Minneapolis, four people in
6 this vehicle were later stopped, four weapons
7 recovered including a couple of Molotov
8 cocktails, and at that point both the county
9 attorney's office and the U.S. attorney's office
10 began looking at this particular case and others
11 related to it to see exactly what kind of
12 prosecution we could bring.
13 MR. WEXLER: That was a pretty
14 important event because, first of all, you were
15 at the hospital that night, you had been alerted
16 right away, people were there and you warned
17 them, then they violated it, and then there was
18 an ATF official, if I remember, was riding with
19 the Minneapolis PD and picked some people up
20 with guns, then we brought that to the meeting
21 and I think it was at that meeting that the U.S.
22 attorney took some action if I'm not mistaken.
23 MR. LILLEHAUG: Yes. The county
24 attorney, Mike Freeman's office and our office
25 looked at these individuals that had been
44
1 arrested and we made a rational decision as to
2 who should be prosecuted where.
3 And these were members of the Bogus
4 Boys. This was a gang that was wreaking
5 enormous havoc in both north and south
6 Minneapolis and certain members are prime
7 suspects in the killing of Byron Phillips.
8 And we took one of those gang members,
9 Carlos Ranell Brandon, and charged him with
10 being a felon in possession of a .40 caliber
11 semiautomatic pistol. He had a previous
12 conviction for drug dealing. He was convicted
13 by a jury on September 16, 1997. The others are
14 making their way through state court.
15 And I think simply dealing with the
16 Bogus Boys gang as part of this Minnesota HEALS
17 effort did have an effect on the numbers that
18 you just saw up on that screen because every day
19 members of those gangs are off the street is one
20 day in which we can feel just a little bit
21 safer.
22 MR. WEXLER: Okay. Real interesting
23 about law enforcement. What is the private
24 sector doing now? What's going on in the
25 corporate side and the community side? How is
45
1 that? Talk about that.
2 MS. HOVEN: Good. As I mentioned, I
3 think the corporate-community side is looking at
4 solutions that are long-term that are what we
5 would call prevention. We believe that if you
6 have a place to live and a good education and a
7 good job you're probably not as apt to be out
8 doing criminal activity so we've been working on
9 many of those things.
10 Along the jobs line, Allina through
11 Abbott Northwestern and Children's, and
12 Honeywell helping to support it, have -- they
13 have 150 jobs at the hospital, entry level jobs,
14 pay good wages, and we all helped to provide
15 some prejob training for people that -- they
16 were hiring people from the neighborhood and
17 many of these people hadn't gone to work before.
18 And part of the training is, if you
19 need three alarm clocks to get to work on time,
20 buy three alarm clocks, and things that a lot of
21 us don't think too much about. So that jobs
22 piece was very important and there are 150 jobs
23 available there.
24 3M in St. Paul worked the jobs unit and
25 now General Mills with Risa, Dave Nasby and
46
1 Ellen Luger and people, have worked very hard to
2 develop a project in north Minneapolis having to
3 do with food, I don't know exactly what it's
4 called, Risa, but, anyway, you're going to have
5 a big project having to do with more jobs
6 there.
7 Housing is a key issue. Again, we
8 think if you own your house and have a good
9 place to live, you're not going to be out on the
10 street as much. So, just recently, if you drive
11 down 26th Street, you've been seeing a lot of
12 buildings coming down between 26th and 28th and
13 between Fifth Avenue and Portland. It's going
14 to be called Portland Place.
15 Honeywell, along with some others, is
16 taking the initiative and we're tearing down all
17 those buildings. 13 percent of the police calls
18 in the Phillips neighborhood were in those two
19 blocks. So, we think that getting rid of some
20 of those crack houses and some of the other
21 things will help. We'll build 52 units of
22 housing with nonprofit developers. There will
23 be aid habitats for humanity houses, PPL is very
24 involved, so it's a real community effort.
25 The African American community got
47
1 together and developed something called
2 "achieving the dream," and they've come up with
3 a variety of ideas as to how they're going to
4 work on this issue.
5 When we started the planning, we
6 started talking about the park board, and
7 someone said, "Well, you know, the park board
8 isn't open as much as it should be on the
9 weekends and often in the summer they close
10 early," and we said, "Well, this is ridiculous.
11 This is when you need to have people out there
12 so the kids have something to do," so we worked
13 with them.
14 There's a Beacon's program in the
15 Minneapolis public schools now that's a pilot,
16 but is funded by many of the foundations, and it
17 is to provide the schools -- the schools are
18 providing use for community after hours so if
19 the kids have something to do, they're not out
20 on the street and these school buildings are
21 being used longer.
22 School start time was another thing,
23 the mayor got very involved in that one, because
24 many of the criminal acts that kids were doing
25 happened in the afternoon when they weren't in
48
1 school. So, if you could start them later in
2 the morning and have them continue longer in the
3 afternoon, they weren't going to be three and
4 out there, so we worked hard on that one.
5 MR. WEXLER: Pat, that's a pretty key
6 point right there just in terms of, you know,
7 people's thinking that, you know, you have the
8 kids and keep kids at home at night, but that
9 three-to-six-hour block can have a big impact on
10 assaults and burglaries, can't it, more than,
11 say, a hundred police officers.
12 MS. HOVEN: Sure. A lot of the parents
13 are working at that time and these kids are just
14 kind of free floating around, so -- and I think
15 we want to do more with the school start in the
16 future.
17 Mentoring is a big thing. Almost
18 anything you read about what is something
19 helpful for kids is mentoring. Many of the
20 corporations are doing the one-to-one
21 mentoring. Now you see ads on TV, everybody
22 from Don Shelby to other people, and the mayor,
23 are talking about mentoring.
24 Honeywell has committed 8000 of our
25 U.S. employees to be mentors by the year 2000.
49
1 We hooked up with the President's summit on
2 that. So we think that will help. Medtronic
3 funded the billboards that we just talked
4 about.
5 All of these are collaborative efforts,
6 they're partnerships with the community. We
7 worked a lot more with the community block
8 clubs. And on the north side, General Mills has
9 worked very, very hard with the block clubs and
10 community efforts, and we've done some of that
11 in Phillips, and because we all have to work
12 together on these things.
13 No one sector can take on these
14 problems alone. We can't arrest everybody, we
15 can't build a house for everybody, but if we all
16 work together, a lot more is going to happen.
17 So, I'm pleased with the progress we have made
18 to date but we have a long way to go.
19 MR. WEXLER: Rod, talk about this from
20 the perspective of the community. How was this
21 been felt in the community, how was it being
22 perceived?
23 MR. WOOTEN: Well, Pat actually talked
24 on a couple specifics about the outcomes, but,
25 you know, this didn't happen just in a vacuum.
50
1 This was a very inclusive process and probably
2 still yet is working very hard to be even more
3 inclusive.
4 From the business community's
5 perspective, as I mentioned earlier, you know,
6 the makeup of our organization kind of precluded
7 that this was initiative that we felt very close
8 and dear to.
9 As I mentioned earlier, I talked about
10 investment. When you think about investments,
11 you think about something being perpetual,
12 something that you expect a return on, your
13 expectations are higher, or your commitment is
14 there, both in capacity and in dollars and
15 resources.
16 When you think about funding, you think
17 about something that is problematic and period
18 certain, and the way we looked at this is that
19 this had to be a true investment into the
20 community.
21 Earlier, I talked about one of our
22 initiatives being youth development and
23 employment. We felt from the standpoint of our
24 organization that youth development and
25 employment was key, that we needed to do more
51
1 and seek more seeding alternatives for kids.
2 I mean activities where kids and youth
3 could be involved in something outside of just
4 day-to-day school as well as we needed to
5 provide opportunity for those individuals who
6 wanted to work but either weren't capable
7 because of the lack of training or weren't
8 capable because of, you know, situations in
9 their life-styles, so we were adamantly working
10 to change most of that.
11 Some of the successes we had relative
12 to the partnerships we developed were those that
13 involved the initiative that Minneapolis
14 Foundation came up with a couple years ago where
15 they were committed to working in our
16 neighborhood which is north Minneapolis and
17 south Minneapolis.
18 They were willing to make the
19 investment and I must stress that point. We
20 think that there needs to be the same level of
21 investment in the community that is currently in
22 law enforcement and also making sure that the
23 communities are viable.
24 MR. WEXLER: Let me just call on
25 Inspector Lubinski to make some final comments
52
1 before we turn to the Attorney General. Just,
2 so what happened? What are the results at the
3 end of the summer, a year later? You know, how
4 did we do and what does the future look like?
5 MS. LUBINSKI: The thing about working
6 on the homicide rate is that there is no
7 fudging. There's no fudging. The number that
8 you see is exactly what happens in your city.
9 So, as we approached the summer, there were a
10 number of people that stood forward and said we
11 are going to go after the homicide rate.
12 And let me tell you, that in and of
13 itself is a bit scary because the homicide rate
14 is something that you cannot hide, and so each
15 and every day we were given a report card of how
16 we were doing. Each and every -- there were
17 times when the pulse was taken on the homicide
18 rate of how are we doing a year ago? How are we
19 doing in the summers of June, July and August?
20 And so there was a lot of heightened attention,
21 heightened scrutiny, about what we did.
22 But I have to say that I think because
23 there were commitments on the part of
24 Honeywell. In all my years of law enforcement,
25 I have not seen corporate America come forward
53
1 in that fashion. People like David Lillehaug
2 rearranged the resources in his office so if he
3 made a commitment at a meeting, the next day
4 that commitment occurred, and when you have
5 Chief Olson made a commitment to expand the gang
6 unit, that happened.
7 And I think as a result of a multitude
8 of things we did have a reduction. For example,
9 I think a very significant number is to compare
10 the summer of 1996, June, July and August,
11 during which we had 40 homicides, to the summer
12 of 1997, June, July and August, we had eight
13 homicides.
14 I think that is a significant thing to
15 really sit up and take notice about and remember
16 what we did well and continue on with that. I
17 think that that is a critical part of today, is
18 that this is not the end, this is not the end of
19 the celebration and it's not the end of the
20 work.
21 And finally, the final numbers in terms
22 of homicides was 58 for the number of homicides,
23 which brings it back to the early numbers of the
24 early '90s in Minneapolis compared to 86 a year
25 ago.
54
1 MR. WEXLER: Before we call on the
2 Attorney General, just one last point, and that
3 this was a Minnesota initiative and the St. Paul
4 Police Department and Chief Finney made a
5 contribution, came to all the meetings, and
6 really worked very well together.
7 So, I think what I would like to do
8 now, with your permission, is ask Ms. Reno if
9 she has some comments and thoughts about all of
10 this.
11 MS. RENO: Could I just ask some
12 questions?
13 MR. WEXLER: Oh, yes, yes, yes.
14 MS. RENO: I would be interested, you
15 have addressed the issue of violence, what about
16 drugs and drug dealings, where do you stand now
17 in that effort?
18 MS. SMABY: Well, I think from the
19 correction's perspective, the volume is still
20 high. There has been instituted in Hennepin
21 County District Court a drug court, but I think
22 the more serious drug dealers are now being
23 diverted to the federal court system.
24 I think the drug court effort in
25 Hennepin County, we had estimated we would have
55
1 about, oh, 1200 offenders. Looks like by
2 year-end in our first full year of operation
3 we'll have close to 2000, maybe as high as 2500
4 offenders.
5 The drug court, I think, is
6 experimenting with the issue of treatment,
7 trying to get individuals who are in need of
8 treatment into treatment immediately, and we
9 have clearly made some achievements in terms of
10 from point of arrest until disposition of case.
11 Over 50 percent of the cases are handled within
12 ten days, which is, as you know, Attorney
13 General Reno, almost a miracle within the
14 justice system.
15 But I think none of us is satisfied
16 that we have yet really made a significant dent
17 as we did, I think, with the homicide rate this
18 past summer in diminishing the level of drug
19 dealing that is still taking place on
20 neighborhood streets. I think that is still the
21 real challenge for us.
22 MR. WEXLER: Dave Lillehaug, do you
23 want to comment, or Sharon Lubinski, about the
24 narcotics issue, because that is a real good
25 question.
56
1 MR. LILLEHAUG: We have a serious
2 narcotics problem in Minneapolis and anyone who
3 says the drug dealing is a victimless crime has
4 not lived next to a crack house. We prosecuted
5 a group of gangsters known as the Detroit Boys.
6 They were running a dozen crack houses in this
7 neighborhood.
8 And then we asked the neighbors to
9 weigh in at sentencing what crack houses were
10 doing in this neighborhood, ranging from -- and
11 the answers ranged from drive-by shootings to
12 constant noise day and night, to kids who were
13 completely neglected, to bullets, condoms, crack
14 pipes and liquor bottles in the gutters.
15 And we need to turn this Minnesota
16 HEALS initiative towards narcotics because there
17 is a perception among drug dealers, many of whom
18 come out of state so they can sell a rack of
19 crack for 20 bucks here that might go for five
20 bucks in Chicago, that the criminal justice
21 system in Minnesota is lenient when it comes to
22 drug dealers, significant drug dealers, and they
23 think they can be arrested and back out on the
24 street again within a few hours or at best a day
25 or two.
57
1 And the proposal we're making in the
2 Minnesota HEALS initiative is that we identify,
3 as we did identify gangsters, those drug dealers
4 who have been through the system over and over
5 again, and believe me, there are those who have
6 been arrested 20, 30, 40, even 50 times, and
7 they don't get long sentences.
8 And that includes not only -- we need
9 not only long federal sentences, but put
10 together a state and local system to deal with
11 the drug dealers that makes sense, and then, for
12 the addicts, to offer treatment because there is
13 no way we can deal only with the supply side and
14 not with the demand side.
15 As Chief Olson says, there is a lot of
16 money on the streets in Minneapolis for drugs,
17 and not just on the streets in Minneapolis. We
18 have to understand that this is a problem that
19 includes the suburbs. People do come into
20 Minneapolis to buy drugs and there are just as
21 many teenagers in Apple Valley where crack --
22 where powder is going up their noses as there
23 are in Minneapolis that are smoking it here, so
24 you've identified exactly the challenge for our
25 next step, Attorney General.
58
1 MS. RENO: Go ahead.
2 FROM THE FLOOR: As long as, on New
3 Year's Day, you could spot 52 drug dealers
4 operating on one block in a city, and that's on
5 Park and Franklin, that was New Year's day and
6 we went out and counted them, 52 drug dealers in
7 the block, then you have not addressed the drug
8 problem. (Applause).
9 MS. RENO: My understanding is that you
10 have about two million people in the greater
11 Twin Cities area, that's about seven counties.
12 How do the seven counties and all the
13 municipalities coordinate their efforts to keep
14 it from spilling from one over to the other?
15 MS. SMABY: I'll just start in, but I
16 think Lieutenant Randy Johnson can speak to this
17 as well, Attorney General Reno. The state
18 legislature this past year provided some funding
19 to create a metropolitan-wide gang task force
20 that is zeroing in on not just gang members but
21 obviously we'll also be dealing with the issues
22 of the serious drug offenders as well, and our
23 office is associated with that.
24 As a matter of fact, they've invited
25 all of us who were working in the Minnesota
59
1 HEALS effort to have a presence with that metro
2 gang effort, and it is a coordinated law
3 enforcement, really criminal justice system-wide
4 effort on a metropolitan basis.
5 Years ago, I'm old enough to have been
6 around this bend before, as I think a number of
7 you out here in the audience with me, there used
8 to be a gang unit and a drug unit on the metro
9 basis, and then that sort of slipped away under
10 the old law enforcement administration days, so
11 I think its resurrection is both critical and
12 also a reflection of our ongoing frustration in
13 not having as comprehensively attacked the drug
14 crime issue as we have with the homicide unit at
15 least on a temporary basis.
16 MS. RENO: What are you doing in
17 truancy prevention?
18 MS. SMABY: I hesitate to be the only
19 one speaking here. I am looking out at the
20 audience. There are a number of people who have
21 played a very significant role in trying to deal
22 with the issue of truancy prevention, and you're
23 right, Attorney General Reno, that's, boy, from
24 the correction's point of view, that is one of
25 the biggest giveaways of potentially a child
60
1 coming unfortunately under our jurisdiction if
2 they're chronically truant.
3 We have a truancy center that has been
4 established in Hennepin County where children
5 who are truant are picked up and go to make a
6 visit. It has gotten particular attention from
7 both city and county and state officials in the
8 last two years.
9 Again, I think while we have a good
10 foundation in place to more effectively deal
11 with the issue of truancy, we are just now
12 experiencing the beginning of that effort as
13 opposed to saying we are able to produce some
14 very instrumental results.
15 The movement, I think, on the part of a
16 number of school districts to also change or
17 alter the school day is also a factor that we
18 think will help us significantly in dealing with
19 that issue.
20 But, again, you're looking, in the
21 front three rows here, at a number of the
22 significant actors in the truancy business who
23 can speak better to that than I.
24 MR. LILLEHAUG: And I think we want to
25 mention the efforts of County Attorney Freeman
61
1 on a related matter, which is curfews in the
2 various municipalities. That is an important
3 piece of it.
4 Anything else?
5 MS. RENO: No.
6 MR. LILLEHAUG: Well, now let me
7 formally introduce the Attorney General. I can
8 tell you very briefly that we U.S. Attorneys
9 have a tremendous sense of comfort and security
10 that Attorney General Reno is our boss.
11 We appreciate her honesty and
12 integrity, her openness to real people, in real
13 neighborhoods, arising out of her experience as
14 state county prosecutor, and we appreciate her
15 lack of pomp and circumstance. Her idea of a
16 junket is to come to Minnesota in January
17 (Applause) to hear about new models of crime
18 fighting.
19 She has made a promise. She has
20 promised that when she retires, and we hope that
21 is a long ways away, that she will come back to
22 Minnesota with her Kayak to spend time in the
23 Boundary Waters, and we know that when Attorney
24 General Janet Reno makes a promise, it will
25 happen.
62
1 I think of the Attorney General every
2 time I think of my favorite quotation, which is
3 from Mark Twain. He said, "Always do what is
4 right. This will astonish some people and
5 gratify the rest." And we look forward to the
6 Attorney General continuing to astonish and
7 gratify us.
8 The Attorney General of the United
9 States.
10 (Standing ovation)
11 MS. RENO: Thank you, David, and thank
12 you all for that warm response, but I'm the one
13 that should be thanking you. I think this is my
14 third trip to Minneapolis and I have been here
15 and I've had people say, "There's not been
16 enough change, we've got to do more."
17 But I talked to people when I first
18 came about the need to approach the problem of
19 crime in a sensible bipartisan, whole way,
20 pointing out that law enforcement and tough
21 penalties were a very important part of that
22 equation but that prevention programs were
23 essential, too.
24 I talked about the need to bring
25 communities together. And the reason I have to
63
1 thank you, Minnesota HEALS today, is because you
2 have proven that it can be done and I can take
3 this message to other parts of the country to
4 say that if we approach crime, and the other
5 problems that face our nation, in a thoughtful,
6 careful, factual way and develop sound plans
7 that respond to what the facts present, we can
8 do it.
9 It's been fun to listen and, I think,
10 perhaps where you lead the way is in the private
11 sector involvement. I haven't heard about
12 federal monies from Washington. You thank me
13 for coming but you don't thank me for money.
14 Other people will thank me for money.
15 There is some community policing money
16 here, there are some excellent programs that the
17 federal government is responsible for, but
18 what's happened here is that a community has
19 pulled itself together, the private sector has
20 understood that it can make an investment in its
21 own company and its own future and together
22 people have made a difference.
23 You have talked about healthcare.
24 Healthcare is part of it all. You've talked
25 about housing. You've talked about parks and
64
1 recreation and talked about education. It's so
2 important. And it is so gratifying to see
3 state, local and federal governments together,
4 to see cities together. Chief Finney was here.
5 It is really exciting. But what is
6 most important is to see people that I met
7 before in the Phillips neighborhood, who looked
8 at me like, hmm, will we really see a
9 difference? And to know that they are seeing a
10 difference, to know how important to this
11 equation are the people who are involved, the
12 people who live in the neighborhoods, and you
13 have proven again that with their involvement,
14 their participation, their speaking out, we can
15 truly make a difference.
16 It's exiting to see what's happened
17 with community probation and community policing,
18 to see what you're doing in the violence against
19 women in the domestic violence areas, but I
20 would like to challenge you. I would like to
21 come back and next time I would like to hear
22 about what you have done about drugs.
23 You've got a danger in the west
24 (applause), methamphetamines have swept across
25 the country into Nebraska, Iowa, and now it's
65
1 hitting you in the west. Get it before it gets
2 stabilized.
3 You're in a nice, wonderful country
4 here, the border lakes, the 10,000 lakes, yes,
5 I'm coming back, but the bad things get here
6 late and crack got here late and it's still
7 here. When I come back, I don't want to hear
8 the word "crack," and I think you can do it
9 based on what you've done. If we understand
10 that the people who distribute the stuff and
11 traffic in the stuff deserve penalties,
12 penalties that fit the crime, we can make a
13 difference.
14 Let us focus together on the gangs, on
15 the groups if they're not gangs, on those guys
16 that are coming from Chicago to prey on your
17 communities and on your people because they can
18 get a higher price for crack here because it's
19 passe in Chicago, let us look at those people
20 who stand on that street corner in Phillips on
21 New Year's Day and convey the stuff and convey
22 the broken windows and the stolen cars and the
23 burglaries, and have records that are not that
24 impressive, but for the people in the community
25 they say countless hours of worry, and getting a
66
1 new car, and getting the insurance forms filled
2 out, and repairing the broken window, and
3 getting the radio back, and taking care of so
4 many details that minor or relatively minor
5 crime means to a community.
6 But let's do it as a partnership. We
7 in the federal government want to be a partner,
8 Mr. Freeman. We don't want to come in and tell
9 you what to do. We don't want to come in and
10 grab a case for the glory of it. We don't want
11 any turf battles. We want to make sure there is
12 a good two-way exchange of information so that
13 if DEA and the FBI have information that can be
14 helpful in your case, you get it, and so, let me
15 know how we can improve and what we can do
16 better.
17 But I'm so proud of what David has done
18 in terms of the violence initiative, and I think
19 working with you in ways that you think are
20 appropriate, we can be so helpful. We can get
21 sentences that fit the crime of these people
22 that traffic in these drugs and we can truly
23 make a difference.
24 But I would like to follow up with drug
25 court. I saw a drug court established in 1988
67
1 in Dade County, the first one. It operates on a
2 carrot and stick approach. It gives a young,
3 nonviolent first offender a chance to get off to
4 a fresh start with close supervision and regular
5 testing, job training and placement, good
6 treatment.
7 But it won't work if we spread it too
8 thin and we have got to ensure the quality of
9 drug court. We can take drug court further, to
10 that four-time offender who has hit rock bottom
11 and is finally pleading for help, but it's going
12 to take a different approach than the approach
13 for the first offender.
14 We've got to tailor these programs so
15 that they work. And when the stick is
16 necessary, we've got to be able to lower the
17 boom so that they know we mean what we say.
18 We've got to focus on the fact that particularly
19 crack has hit at young women, women with
20 children, women with small infants.
21 Minnesota can look at what New York has
22 done in one of its state prisons, where women
23 with crack-involved infants are together,
24 learning how to raise children the right way so
25 that when they come out they do not lose another
68
1 child to the community.
2 You can make a difference. If you're
3 smart but tough, if you make the threat, the
4 legitimate, decent, respectable threat, and then
5 make sure you carry it out, but you've got to
6 mean what you say, both in terms of the
7 penalties threatened and in terms of the
8 treatment offered.
9 I was surprised that you talked about
10 healthcare as if we should be surprised that it
11 was talked about in connection with criminal
12 justice, because up until about 1988, there was
13 no course work in addictionology in America's
14 medical schools. The healthcare industry hadn't
15 really gotten involved.
16 And then it got involved but it was
17 kind of expensive. And then the healthcare
18 industry started looking at how it can do it
19 smarter, better and more cost effectively, and
20 you have been champions in this area in so many
21 instances, but we have got to form a stronger
22 partnership between the public health systems of
23 this country and the criminal justice systems,
24 and we welcome your suggestions as to what we
25 can do better in developing better drug courts
69
1 and better treatment.
2 Now, I don't think I've met your head
3 of corrections for the state, but that's another
4 problem. If you've got somebody in state prison
5 or in your jail that is a user, an addict,
6 you've got one of the first advantages, you've
7 got a place to put them.
8 Let's use that place to put them and
9 make sure we work together at all levels of
10 government to get appropriate funding for sound
11 treatment in the prisons and then let's use the
12 carrot and stick approach again and say, "Look,
13 you cooperate with us, you work with us in
14 treatment, you stay clean, we'll work you
15 through the system," and get job training, into
16 a placement, into work release, into a
17 community, but it won't work unless we provide
18 not only the treatment in the prison or in the
19 jail but treatment in terms of aftercare and
20 follow-up in the community.
21 But that comes back to the community
22 itself. Those neighbors who wanted that person
23 off the street can be the same people that
24 welcome that neighbor back and give them a fresh
25 start.
70
1 But when I came to Minnesota before, I
2 talked about prevention and some people, even in
3 the wonderful state of Minnesota, which is so
4 enlightened, looked at me like, what is the
5 Attorney General of the United States talking
6 about prevention for?
7 Well, Honeywell will tell you that you
8 aren't going to attract people to Minneapolis
9 unless you start doing something about crime and
10 start earlier, and Honeywell will also tell you
11 it won't have a work force in 50 years unless we
12 make an investment in children now, not just in
13 terms of crime reduction but in terms of
14 immunizations, in terms of educare, in terms of
15 afternoon and evening programs, in terms of
16 programs that keep them in school and try to
17 give them the best education possible, in terms
18 of school to work programs that can make a
19 difference, and you're doing it here and it is
20 so exciting to see the balance between law
21 enforcement, and tough enforcement where it's
22 needed, and prevention programs that can make a
23 difference.
24 Explore further as you develop these
25 ideas about drugs and youth and prevention what
71
1 we can do in terms of community justice. You
2 have community policing initiatives now, you
3 have community probation officers. What about
4 community courts in the Phillips neighborhood
5 where everybody knows everybody and you can make
6 it work. I've seen it work in the heart of
7 midtown Manhattan.
8 It can work in Minneapolis and suddenly
9 people will start looking at it not just as
10 numbers and names they don't recognize but as
11 true community justice where the community can
12 be supportive of the whole system.
13 Ladies and gentlemen, in Boston, I
14 watched a variation of your efforts work to
15 bring down crime and to save the lives of young
16 people. I've watched it work here from a
17 distance and now today I've seen it firsthand.
18 I've seen comprehensive efforts work in San
19 Diego.
20 You all are proving to this country
21 that people who care, that governments that
22 care, that agencies that care and that neighbors
23 that care, can make a difference. I'm going to
24 go back to Washington and try to share this with
25 other communities, try to help them find the
72
1 ingredients of what works and what doesn't work,
2 letting them know that each community
3 understands its needs and resources better, but
4 I want to continue to hear from you.
5 It's been fun to get a letter from the
6 people in the Phillips neighborhood, saying, "We
7 want to do this." Keep it coming. It's 10th
8 Avenue and Constitution 20530, Washington, D.C.
9 So, when I come back, I won't hear
10 about drugs anymore, I'll hear about the route I
11 should take to the Boundary lakes. But remember
12 one thing, you have proven that things can work
13 but you must not become complacent. Continue to
14 watch the developments because it does happen.
15 I can remember thinking we had turned
16 the corner when I was the prosecutor in Dade
17 County and then a mysterious substance started
18 to receive comments from police officers. They
19 said, "It's some kind of cocaine but it's
20 violence inciting. It's just compulsive, it's
21 addictive so quickly. What are we going to do
22 about it?" And we heard about crack for the
23 first time.
24 But we didn't react because we were
25 complacent and didn't understand the need to
73
1 look at the data and react quickly. Some of our
2 challenges we can see right now. The number of
3 young people will increase significantly in the
4 next ten years. We've got to be prepared.
5 But if we approach the problem of crime
6 and the problem of public health and the problem
7 of jobs for America's future and the problem of
8 how we make America's industries strong and
9 vital and the best in the world, we all start
10 with the same thing. Come together, invest in
11 human beings wisely, hold those who do wrong
12 accountable, and work together to solve the
13 problems.
14 You've given me a great message for the
15 rest of America and I thank you very, very
16 much. (Standing ovation).
17 MR. LILLEHAUG: That concludes our
18 program and please take special care to drive
19 safely today. Thank you.
20
21 (WHEREUPON, this matter was
22 concluded at 12:30 p.m.)
23
24
25
74
1 STATE OF MINNESOTA)
2 COUNTY OF DAKOTA)
3 I, JOHN R. BRENNAN, C.S.R., a notary
4 public in and for the County of DAKOTA and State
5 of MINNESOTA, do hereby certify that the above
6 roundtable discussion was recorded
7 stenographically by me and reduced to
8 typewriting by me. I FURTHER CERTIFY that the
9 foregoing transcript of the said discussion is a
10 true and correct transcript of the proceedings
11 at the time and place specified hereinbefore.
12 IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand
13 and seal of office this 13th day of January,
14 1998.
15
16
17 JOHN R. BRENNAN
18 Certified Shorthand Reporter
19
20 My notary commission
21 expires January 31, 2000.
22
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