In 1998 my friend Brian Sullivan served as the chairman of our state Republican Party’s platform committee. I think Brian appointed John Hinderaker and me committee members. We wrote the platform that Brian assured us he would get approved at the party convention, as he did.
Brian, by the way, is the founder and chief executive officer of Celcuity, a company whose market capitalization is now over $3.5 billion and whose product (in successful clinical trials) holds the promise of extending the lives of women suffering with advanced breast cancer. From chairman of the 1998 Minnesota GOP platform committee Brian has gone on to great things.
Norm Coleman was the Republican candidate for governor in 1998. When I ran into Norm at an event after the convention I asked him if he had the audacity to run on the platform we had written. He warmly assured me that he did. It didn’t hurt him either, although he and DFL candidate Skip Humphrey lost to Jesse Ventura. It was time for the clown show. Ventura had no qualms about embarrassing his voters.
Among the provisions of the 1998 GOP platform was one that proposed the abolition of the juvenile justice system. It’s a system with many wrinkles and here I can only speak broadly about it. We should have proposed the reversal of the presumptions that currently afford minors treatment in the juvenile justice system even in the case of felonies. In such cases, treatment in the system should be an exception rather than the rule.
The memory occurs to me in connection with the wave of carjackings we have experienced in Minneapolis this week. Two teenagers — ages 15 and 16 — generated a crime wave for a day. Their festivities ended when they crashed a stolen car into parked cars and a fire hydrant in south Minneapolis as they sought to evade the police.
The three carjackings on Monday included one involving city council member Jamal Osman. “But the most egregious incident,” according to Star Tribune story, “occurred on the city’s North Side, where a mother and her young daughter were carjacked near N. Elwood and Humboldt Avenues around 5:15 p.m. The suspect jumped in the front seat as the mother was attempting to strap her toddler in the back — repeatedly punching her in the face as she clung to her child inside the moving vehicle.”
The Star Tribune spoke to to the mother, who was leaving work at a nearby daycare facility:
“This guy appears out of nowhere,” Aguirre recalled in a phone interview, noting that his face was obscured with a COVID-style mask.
The teen hopped in the front and began to drive. Aguirre jumped in the back, lying on top of her 18-month-old child huddled on the floor. He turned and assaulted her before crashing about a block away and fleeing on foot.
“I was trying to protect my little daughter,” she said, adding that her child was not physically harmed. But the attack left her riddled with bruises on her face and leg and shook her sense of security. Aguirre is scared to walk to her car alone at night now.
“I know the world is dangerous…but I’ve never experienced nothing like this,” she said. “I couldn’t have reacted different. It was my baby, you know?”
Minneapolis police apprehended the teens, but neither their names nor the charges against them will be revealed unless they are subject to adult justice. And unless they are subject to adult justice, the jurisdiciton of the juvenile justice system will terminate once they turn 18. It is not a system with a deterrent effect sufficient unto the day.
By the way, councilman Osman is Somali. One looks in vain for a description of the perpetrators in the coverage. It doesn’t provide a clue, although it could. See, for example, the linked Star Tribune story and the KARE 11 story below on the mom subject to the second carjacking.
The Minneapolis police force remains woefully understaffed. That too goes unmentioned in the coverage of this week’s carjackings. More officers are needed on the street in high-crime precincts to institute the kind of presence that might deter these crimes. The WCCO story below suggests the need before the anchor concludes with the observation that it’s getting better all the time.
At the time of Saint George Floyd’s death in May 2020, Minneapolis had more than 900 sworn officers. I asked Minneapolis police union president Sherral Schmidt for an update on the numbers this week. As of today, according to Lieutenant Schmidt, the force has a total of 592 sworn officers with only 550 full duty sworn. It’s not enough and everybody knows it.
