The Minneapolis City Council has rejected a bid submitted by the mayor and police chief to offer retention and recruitment sign-on bonuses for city police officers and new hires.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara came forward last week with a plan to spend $15 million in an effort to retain officers currently on the force and to offer incentive bonuses for new hires.
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State leaders in Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis reached an agreement to send state police forces to assist with law enforcement staffing issues in the city.
The “joint powers agreements” will allow state forces to “provide high visibility patrol in agreed upon areas and during agreed upon times to help deter crime”
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Republicans in the Minnesota Senate are touting public safety bills that are working their way through the legislation process.
The group recently passed S.F. 2673 out of committee. The complex, lengthy legislation would target sentence requirements for criminals, support for law enforcement, and additional transparency in the judicial process.
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Republicans in the Minnesota House of Representatives on Tuesday released their plan to address public safety, unveiling almost a dozen different pieces of legislation.
The lawmakers argued that members of the opposing political party have not addressed the spike in crime that has been felt by residents of the state.
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The U.S. Department of Transportation’s “National Roadway Safety Strategy” includes promoting the use of speed cameras in cities and towns as a “proven safety countermeasure.”
DOT received $6 billion to issue grants to “help cities and towns” with road safety, which was part of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that Congress passed.
“That law creates a new Safe Streets and Roads for All program, providing $6 billion to help cities and towns deliver new, comprehensive safety strategies, as well as accelerate existing, successful safety initiatives,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg during a speech on Thursday about the launch of DOT’s National Roadway Safety Strategy.
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One Minneapolis man has taken pains to record all reported carjackings since 2020 on an interactive map.
Resident Steve Taylor created the map on Maps.co. It gives users the coordinates where each carjacking occurred, dates and times when they occurred, and even the distance between the locations of the previous and next carjackings.
Red pins indicate carjackings in 2021, while yellow pins indicate carjackings in 2020.
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Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison apparently thinks Democrats should have sought to defund the police without saying “defund the police.”
“I think allowing this moniker, ‘defund the police,’ to ever get out there, was not a good thing,” he recently told Washington Post reporter David Weigel. This comment followed an election in Minneapolis in which voters rejected a measure that would have replaced the police with a largely unarmed “Department of Public Safety.”
While Ellison’s most recent comment has drawn significant media attention, this position is not new — the AG has long wanted to reduce policing, only taking issue with the slogan his fellow progressives often use.
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The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) issued a Public Safety Alert Monday warning of the surge in illegal fake painkillers combined with illicit fentanyl or methamphetamine.
The Public Safety Alert, the first warning in six years, highlighted the surge in fentanyl and methamphetamine-laced pills mass produced by criminal drug groups, which are killing Americans at a historic rate, according to a DEA press release.
“The United States is facing an unprecedented crisis of overdose deaths fueled by illegally manufactured fentanyl and methamphetamine,” Anne Milgram, administrator of the DEA, said in the press release.
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University of California’s new Community Safety Plan shifts major responsibilities and funding away from UC Police Departments.
The plan, based on an 80-page report released this summer by the Department of Public Safety Community Advisory Board, was announced by UC President Michael Drake last week and will be implemented across all 10 campuses. It reflects UC’s “commitment to equity and social justice.”
“Under this new model, a multidisciplinary team of mental health professionals, campus police, social service providers, police accountability boards and other personnel will work together to prioritize the well-being of the entire UC community,” Drake said in a message to the university. “This reimagined structure will ensure that the m,ost appropriate responders are deployed to meet our community’s specific needs with tailored care resources and services.”
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Many lawmakers who have ordered or urged citizens not to leave their homes due to the coronavirus pandemic have not followed their own advice.
The Daily Caller News Foundation has kept track of those politicians or local lawmakers who spurned their own COVID-19 rules to attend President Joe Biden’s inauguration and the lawmakers who flouted their own advice and then excused their behavior as essential, compiling lists of the biggest offenders such as Democrats New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many more.
The DCNF searched for, but did not find, examples of prominent Republicans who urged citizens to stay home due to COVID-19 and then did not follow their own advice. Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, sparked a backlash when he traveled to Cancun in February as Texans struggled without power under heavy ice storms.
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