Not only did this bypass the process of going to the City Council before staff applies for a large grant, it bypassed the relevant Public Safety Committee and went to the POGO Committee.
It's not that there wasn't close to unanimous support for the concept of an early intervention system for problem officers. At issue was whether the money should be withheld from MPD pending the presentation of an actual plan to build the system.
This amendment from Ward 3 Council Member Steve Fletcher to accept the grant, but withhold from MPD pending a plan, failed 7-6.
No: Goodman, Palmisano, Reich, Cano, Johnson, Jenkins, Osman
Yes: Fletcher, Bender, Gordon, Cunningham, Ellison, Schroeder
Several council members wondered why it hadn't gone to the relevant committee. The significance of bypassing the Public Health and Safety Committee is committee membership. Fletcher's amendment would have been adopted based on how those members voted yesterday.
It's a reminder that the city council's policymaking power over MPD is currently limited by city charter to budgets.
Council President Bender: "Once we approve [MPD] budget items sometimes we never hear about them again."
Bender: "Predictive systems use data to predict future behavior. If biased information is entered into a system, then we can expect biased results."
Ward 2 Council Member Cam Gordon said he lacked confidence in MPD based on their inability to implement this in the past.
Fletcher challenged colleagues to "think about 'what is our role?'... There's a lot of conversation about what the power of the council is and should be... We have policies in place to say this should have been brought to us and it should have been discussed. And it was not."
There's no shortage of reasons not to trust MPD to develop a program to identify problem officers, but here's one.
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