BY ED FELIEN
At first, City Council Members Payne, Wonsley and Chavez moved to transfer some of the programs in the Neighborhood Safety Department to the county. There had been widespread public criticism of what seemed like mismanagement of funds. There was a whistleblower lawsuit last November that said a staff member had awarded a $5,000 grant to her sister. The London-based right-wing tabloid, The Daily Mail, screamed in a headline: “Jaw-dropping ‘corruption’ of Minneapolis’ taxpayer-backed defund the police department.”
Director of the Neighborhood Safety Department, Luana Nelson-Brown
The Director of the Department, Luana Nelson-Brown, told Channel Five that she had stopped funding the Violence Interrupters because they weren’t providing sufficient documentation; they would just submit a number and expect to get paid.
When the city threatened to cut off the $7.5 million funding for the Violence Interrupters, that brought Jerry McAfee and some of his Violence Interrupters to council meetings. He told the council, “I need you to get your fire back for why you ran in the first place and take care of our people.”
He’s had $306,000 contracts with the city and $3 million contracts with the state to stop violence.
At one point, McAfee seemed to verbally threaten Jason Chavez: “The way you lookin’ at me, if you wanna come behind that podium, you do it. I guarantee, I guarantee you will regret it.” Even though he later said he wasn’t threatening Chavez: “I don’t pick a fight, but I do have a right to defend myself,” his words are ones that are commonly used just before a fight breaks out.
Violence Interrupters are mostly young adults from North Minneapolis who are paid to go around and stop fights. The program employs and socially regulates young people to help keep the peace in their community. At one level, it seems like the old-fashioned protection racket, where you paid the mob not to break your windows.
Jerry McAfee
There has been criticism of the Violence Interrupter model from its beginning in Chicago.
From Wikipedia: “Malte Riemann, a professor of international relations, cautioned that the model displays a neoliberal logic that runs the risk of ‘replacing political solutions with medical diagnosis and treatment models’. This has depoliticizing effects as ‘violence becomes disentangled from socio-economic inequalities and explained by reference to individual pathology alone’. The possible limitations of the model’s extension to conflict resolution have also been discussed, especially the ‘risk of undermining the establishment of positive peace in a post-conflict environment’. A similar sentiment was expressed by the director of Aim4Peace, an implementing site in Kansas City. She noted that preventing violence on a case-by-case basis could only go so far, and creating a culture of peace requires building positive lifestyles.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cure_Violence
Council Member Robin
Wonsley
Most violence is a direct result of poverty and ignorance. People carjack, rob and steal because they need money, and they don’t know any other way to get it.
Yes, we will probably have to continue spending money on our Violence Interrupters, but we must have accountability. The City Council has a responsibility to tell us, the voters, the ones that pay the bills, what is happening with our money. Also, anyone enrolled as a Violence Interrupter must have vocational guidance counseling: “Hi, how are you? Where do you want to be five years from now? What’s the best way for you to get there?”
In the end, the City Council decided to keep the program with the city.
They made the mess.
They decided. They’ll have to clean it up.
