BY ED FELIEN
Precinct caucuses are coming up Tuesday night, April 4. On that night, the DFL starts all over again.
The goddess Aphrodite (Venus, in the Roman pantheon) was extravagant in her affections, but every night she would return to her father, Poseidon, the god of the sea, and he would wash her clean, and she would have no memory of last night’s fling, and when the new night began, her adventures started all over again.
The DFL is a little like that—at the grass roots.
In less than two months, new delegates will be elected at the precinct caucuses. They will become the new Minneapolis DFL. A large number of delegates will be elected to endorse a candidate for the City Council seat for Ward 8 on Saturday, April 29, and for Wards 6 and 9 on Saturday, May 6. A smaller and very important group of delegates will be elected at the precinct caucuses to represent their neighborhood at the City DFL Endorsing Convention, June 24. They will endorse candidates for the Board of Estimate and Taxation, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board and mayor.
Keith Ellison is running to be head of the Democratic National Committee at the end of February. If he gets elected, he’s said he will resign his seat in Congress. The governor would declare a special election to fill the seat. Only delegates elected last year to the DFL 5th District Convention would be eligible to vote for that endorsement.
There’s a quiet canonization taking place in the 2nd Ward. Everyone seems to love Cam Gordon. There’s no one from the DFL running against him. People in the DFL should still go to their precinct caucuses because even if they don’t have a DFL Ward endorsing convention, people at the precinct caucuses will also elect delegates to the city convention, and those delegates will endorse candidates for mayor, Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board and Board of Estimate and Taxation.
We asked all the candidates for City Council and mayor:
What would you do to stop the Minneapolis Police Department from killing young black men? Would you support an investigation into possible police misconduct in the deaths of Jamar Clark and Terrance Franklin?
We wrote to all the candidates in the 6th Ward: Abdi Warsame, the incumbent; Mohamud Noor, who ran against Phyllis Kahn in 2014 and then lost last year in a three way contest to Ilhan Omar; Tiffini Flynn Forslund; and Fadumo Yusuf.
Fadumo Yusuf responded:
I do believe that further investigations into police misconduct need to be active and the officers must be held accountable on criminal charges. Too many innocent lives have been taken and we cannot bring them back. But what we can do is to ensure that further lives are not taken and honor those who have lost their lives. Our public safety is at risk and our law enforcement is in a questionable state.
We asked candidates in the 12th Ward:
William Jaeger: “Recognizing that being a COP in any community is a hard job, is a must. Recognizing that unnecessary deaths are just that—UNNECESSARY, is also a must. I would support any investigation surrounding government misconduct, especially with an issue as important as HUMAN RIGHTS.”
Andrew Johnson: “I co-authored a budget amendment to fast-track implicit bias and procedural justice training for all police officers; have been a vocal advocate for body cameras to increase accountability (now fully rolled out); pushed for improvements to officer hiring to more heavily favor skills like conflict resolution; and called for an independent federal investigation after Jamar Clark was killed. We rely on police as one of the ways to address crime, and not only must we hold them to the highest standards, we also owe them better training and coaching, more opportunities to build community relations, and time to de-escalate situations.”
We asked candidates for DFL endorsement for mayor the same question. Only Aswar Rahman, the former youth policy assistant to Mayor Rybak and feature-length filmmaker, answered:
“More black officers in the MPD. That will be my mayoral duty. More African Americans, more Latinos, and more women have to be encouraged to join the police force if we’re ever going to turn back the tide on the killing of young black men in our city. My administration will hold targeted weekly recruitment drives—179 events over four years—all with the sole purpose of getting black and Latino men and women within our city to pursue a career in law enforcement. As for police misconduct investigations—a thorough one for every civilian death, period.”
