You had to read today's PiPress to be informed of the comments of "civil rights leaders" calling for passage of a racial profiling bill in the legislature this year. The Strib was allocating space and manpower to items like the date for a funeral of an abandoned child in Marshall, the Solomonic sentencing of an embezzler to gambling treatment, a brother who succeeds his sister in Brooklyn Park city government, and the 18 minute delay of a Twins game due to a "voltage dip and momentary power failure" in downtown Minneapolis. Get this: the last item was covered by two reporters. I was at the Capitol press conference and there was something very sad about the occasion especially in contrast to the way we felt on March 28th, on the occasion of another event at the Capitol that the Strib failed to cover. No doubt there was some other earth shattering news that day that prevented them from covering the vote of the Senate Judiciary Committee that passed a bill including mandatory data collection. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Yesterday there was much talk about "working together" and "compromise" and important first steps. Lester Collins, executive director of the Council on Black Minnesota put on his game face but the man almost lost it when he had to refer to the word "compromise". You would think that in 2001, 225 years after the phase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" entered the national lexicon, and nearly 140 years after The Emancipation Proclamation, and so on and so on, the word "compromise" would not be a part of the discussion around a racial profiling bill. On March 28th, compromise was not an option. When Jason Brown of the NAACP answered a question put to him by one of the Senators as to whether something would be acceptable to his community, "compromise" was not a concepy he would accept. Two days prior to that date in a meeting with Senators Jane Ranum and Myron Orfield, Jason Brown of the Mpls. chapter of NAACP, jon powell of the Institute on Poverty and Race, John Stewart of the State Public Defenders Office and yours truly, representing Communities United Against Police Brutality(CUAPB) the word "compromise" when it came to mandatory data collection was not on the table. On March 30th at a rally in the Capitol Rotunda, attended by Charles Samuelson of MCLU, Jerry Blakey of St. Paul City Council and Ron Edwards, spokesman for the Black Police Officers Assn and assorted others the word "compromise" never arose. I like to say that leaders dream while politicians scheme. Politics as we know is the art of compromise. No wonder Americans are so turned off at the polls! So few real leaders these days. So what happened from the time we sat at a conference table in one of those cavernous Capitol chambers and agreed that any bill without mandatory data collection was worse than no bill at all til last Thursday when the Senate Finance Committee passed the bill that will now go to the Senate floor and on to a conference committee where Rep. Rich Stanek, aka Inspector Rich Stanek of the MPD, recently promoted I might add(hint, hint) has been overheard saying he'll eviscerate the Senate bill. On the wet, cold evening of March 28th when the rest of America south of Minnesnowta was dreaming of Spring and we were still quaking for fear of Eliot's cruelest month, five African Americans gave testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. All had testified before in the Senate Crime Prevention Committee and some had sat patiently through over 12 hours of hearings that could only have broken their hearts had not they been broken long ago by the sleights of the majority society and the unkept promises of past Civil Rights battles. I know I was ashamed at the questions of certain Senators, who, having heard compelling heartfelt evidence time and time again from people who bore emotional scars as surely visible as if they had gaping wounds spurting blood. Who could doubt the Solomons, father and son, or the written testimony of Former Rep. Richard Jefferson, or the knowing voice of Sen. Satveer Chaudray, the only non-caucasian in the Senate, as he gently questioned witnesses. But Crime Prevention was behind us and The Judiciary Committee held new promise. Through the eloquence of two Jews and an Irish-American, Senator Jane Ranum's doublecross of Sen. Neuville, Kelly and allies who thought they had laid to rest the issue of mandatory data collection was complete. Myron Orfield was superb. Again and again he came back to the point that there was something inherently wrong with a bunch of white guys sitting around a conference table agreeing to something the people they were supposedly protecting were opposed to. Sen Cohen of Highland Park kept seconding that notion. In the most telling moment the only former police officer in the Senate, Leo Foley of Coon Rapids, said that without a doubt racial profiling existed throughout the state and that if the measure that night to mandate racial data collection failed and it was left up to the voluntary effort of jurisdictions, he hoped his County Sheriff, Larry Podany, whom he faced across the table, would be the first to institute data collection. This was just prior to casting the swing vote in favor of mandatory collection. This was historic. And it never made it into the news though some of you may have read it here. A few days later Nathaniel Khaliq of the St. Paul chapter of NAACP and another person were quoted in one of the papers as decrying the fact nothing had been accomplished on the Senate's racial profiling bill before the March 31st deadline. Hey, if it's not in the Strib, it never happened. Then the bill went to a Senate Finance subcommittee on Crime for funding where mandatory was stripped back out of the bill for everyone but the Minnesota State Patrol. This infuriated Capt. Ann deBeers and Public Safety Commissioner who hates all of this(he's from Anoka, ya know). According to my sources it got very ugly going so far as Sen. Dick Day chiding African American reprentatives for coddling criminals in their community to which one person answered "we knew about gangs and drugs long before the white community and were calling for help." This meeting occured on the evening of the Mpls. Mayoral candidate forum at Whittier. As amusing as it was to see the candidates for the DFL nomination, I wished I had been in St. Paul, It was about this time that the St. Paul chapter of the NAACP took center stage as did Lester Collins of the Council on Black Minnesotans. The undercurrent i get from comments yesterday at the press conference is that the folks from Mpls were just a little too much in the faces of the politicians and cooler heads ought to prevail, heads that could reach a compromise. Now to those of you white folk out there who might think of the African American community as monolithic let me tell you there are as many shade of grey in that community as there are in the Minneapolis DFL Party. The people who had done the heavy lifting, who had attended days of hearings, hearings that got postponed at the last minute for two and three hours or cancelled altogether leaving one standing like a fool in the rain gradually were edged out of the process til what you ended up with was what the Senate will vote on and take to the House. And to hear the spin: "well, it's the best that could be done", "it's a good first step"(who are these people, members of AA?), "the consolation for me is that we get cameras in the cars which black people want because of police brutality", and my personal favorite " no I don't like it, I would rather see mandatory data collection, but...". Spoken like a true politician. So now we have the Black Police Officers Assn. of Minneapolis whose members went out on a limb in the Judiciary Committee feeling doublecrossed; it's executive director Charles Adams, the Mayor's Chief of Security and Ron Edwards, spokesman for BPOA and SSB supporter, feeling doublecrossed and cut out of the process by Senator Ranum who is a R.T. Rybak for Mayor supporter and who despite her genteel southern voice and manners will sacrifice principles and break promises for political advantage as quick as you can say Jack Sprat, thousands of blacks sold down the river by petty jealousies and the outsized egos of black establishment types with moderate voices who see a chance to burnish their images come in at the end to "save the day", a federal mediator for the Justice Department whose sole function in town is to moderate between the city of St. Paul and the NAACP sticking his nose into the Capitol mix, the executive director of the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Assn. who is also Sen. Randy Kelly's campaign finance director and angling to be the hopeful Senator's Chief of Staff should he be elected Mayor of St. Paul, the police departments of the state's two largest cities mad as hell at the Police Officers Standards and Training Board(POST) and threatening to bolt, the executive director of POST miffed at being cut out of the negtiations, Public Safety Commissioner Charlie Weaver opposed to the recommendation of the Commission on Racial Profiling he chaired that called for mandatory data collection and opposed to this newest incarnation of SF386, a Governor who could do just about anything if a bill got to him, and a bill that's not all that good to start with and only promises to get worse. All this came about because people could not accept a simple, straightforward, and relatively inexpensive process that would mandate collection of data on stops by police so that we could identify, gauge and correct the problem of racial profiling. Now we will move forward spending millions of dollars on gadgetry and some camera salesman somewhere is laughing all the way to the bank. Politics! Ain't it grand? Oh, I almost forgot Sen. Dick Day. Words escape me at this point. Aren't you all happy? Tim Connolly Minneapolis Ward 7 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - Minnesota E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
