Transcripts

EUAN KERR: As a mid-day school bus brings kids back to the Sumner-Olson neighborhood in Minneapolis's near Northside, everything seems quiet. However, the president of the residents council, Louise James, says that they have problems.

LOUISE JAMES: There's breaking and entering now. They're breaking into people's homes. But in the summertime, it's street gambling, drinking, and loud talking, cursing. You can't let your child out on the street. But see, this is supposed to be where families live and children are supposed to be able to come out in their yards and play.

EUAN KERR: James, who has lived in the area for 16 years, and describes herself as a neighborhood advocate, took the problems to the mayor and to the police. She asked that the neighborhood housing patrol be allowed to carry guns. A police investigator who went out with the patrol was alarmed at the kind of violent crimes that they were dealing with.

However, the request for firearms was denied, but nine officers from the fourth precinct will be assigned to patrol the area 24 hours a day, subject to the approval of a meeting at city hall this evening, helped by the seven-member housing patrol. Louise James says that many residents were afraid to do anything about the crime problem because they were having to protect their families. However, now the residents are happy with the new patrol plan, which will start early in the new year.

LOUISE JAMES: And we just made up our mind that we're not going to stand by and just continue to see them walk all over the top of us like they want to do. And they are residents. They're not nobody else. And the ones that's breaking in our homes is resident kids and teenagers and young men in the area. It's not no outsiders coming in.

EUAN KERR: Police Chief Tony Bouza says he supports the idea for the Sumner-Olson police patrol, and he thinks it will stabilize the community. However, although it makes sense in the case of Sumner-Olson--

TONY BOUZA: In terms of extending this to the rest of the city, it really doesn't. We need to keep the force, to some degree, reactive, responding to 911 calls, or making arrests, traffic safety. So to some degree, we are locked into a reactive, impersonal style of policing that I find hard to avoid.

EUAN KERR: Yeah, just as the problems of one community were being dealt with, another came to the fore. At a noon rally in front of the Hennepin County Government Center, members of the American Indian Movement, or AIM, announced that they would be restarting their street patrol to combat what they see as an unacceptable level of crime against the Indian community.

Holding placards with the names of 10 Indians who have died in suspicious circumstances, a crowd of around 150 were told by Bill Means of the International Indian Treaty Council that insufficient attention was being paid to deaths involving Indians.

BILL MEANS: It was proven and stated in the Minneapolis Tribune that at least 20% of all unsolved murders were Indian people here in the city of Minneapolis. We make up less than 2% of the city's population. So you can see we have a very, very frightening disproportion of murders in our community.

EUAN KERR: Means met with Hennepin County Attorney Tom Johnson, who reportedly agreed to have a staff person assigned to look into the cases. For its part, AIM intends to investigate the various cases itself, and will present a report to the county attorney's office in about two weeks. The AIM patrol, which will work closely with the Guardian Angels Safety Patrol, will go out for the first time on December 19.

The patrol, which was originally started in 1968 to monitor alleged police brutality, is now supposed to discourage outsiders who are causing trouble within the Indian community. However, Bill Means says that more police is not what is needed.

BILL MEANS: I don't think we need more police presence, to be honest with you. That's why we formed the patrol. I think between Indian patrol, Guardian Angels, and the existing police in the area, I think we should be able to drastically decrease the crime rate in the area. I think more police has a tendency to bring more fear to the community in the sense of almost becoming like an occupied area.

EUAN KERR: Means says that part of the problem is that the media are not paying enough attention to murders involving Indians. Yet Chief Bouza says that perhaps the press is paying too much attention to all the murders in the city, and the reaction to the crime rate is overblown.

TONY BOUZA: The difference between having 50 homicides this year and 30 next, it will be a matter of a question of inches, whether the bullet hits the brain or misses, or whether a knife strikes the heart of misses by inches, or what will be much more reflective of the real trends in terms of public safety are crimes such as assaults, robberies, burglaries, and auto thefts.

EUAN KERR: Minneapolis Police Chief Tony Bouza. The public housing department in Minneapolis City Hall will meet this evening to approve the extra officers for Sumner-Olson. I'm Euan Kerr.