Council President Brendmoen says she appreciates the comments. We are passing
ARP funds that are emergency programs. There are state, county, and other programs
that are active. This feels more like piecemeal. This one is throwing money at a
problem. She would like to see how the Ramsey County plan works.
Councilmember Thao said he will speak against this resolution as well. He
appreciates we have broken the resolution into separate items.
Jalali moved to approve.
2 in favor, 5 opposed (Noecker, Prince, Thao, Yang, Brendmoen)
Resolution fails
Failed
2 - Councilmember Tolbert and Councilmember Jalali
Yea:
Nay:
5 -
Councilmember Brendmoen, Councilmember Thao, Councilmember
Noecker, Councilmember Prince and Councilmember Yang
Authorizing the City to transfer $181,000 of American Rescue Plan funds to a
specific account for the Law Enforcement Career Path Academy.
18
Council President Brendmoen we are taking items separately from last week’s budget
amendment so that we can look at them separately. We had a discussion last week.
Councilmember Jalali said she wanted to speak to it again. She mentioned concerns
last week. It was her understanding someone would speak to what this is. She has
asked questions offline regarding what the program is, what we get out of it, the goals
behind it. She has supported this in the past. The idea behind it is diversifying the
police. She has maintained and talked about it a lot that we need to shift away from
growing the police department. The total is so far 8 officers who are officers of color.
That is after hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment. They should get away
from diversifying institutions that are systemically more violent. She won’t be
supporting the item.
Brendmoen said Deputy Chief Stacy Murphy is here. Brendmoen says she completely
understands shifting away from Police. For the record, since we have been doing law
enforcement, we have had one Police academy. The opportunity of bringing people
into the force is not there. Just an opportunity to be part of the community and
contributing may lead people to other roles in the City and other roles in public safety,
and public safety in other cities. There are so many nuanced angles of that.
Deputy Chief Murphy said the law enforcement career path academy, there have been
8 students in the program who were hired on and gotten through the police academy.
They are currently out working as an officer. There were 4 additional individuals from
the academy that ended up being hired at other police agencies because we did not
have an academy last year. Currently, there are 21 students that have conditional job
offers for the academy that is supposed to start in October. These funds are for a
group of 20 in the law enforcement academy starting in September, which aligns with
Century College. This is another feeder program into the law enforcement academy:
parking enforcement, community liaison, and this is the third pathway. The purpose is
to get individuals engaged in doing community work before becoming a police officer,
so they see the value in doing that type of work. That is the goal. They feel
individuals who did not finish the program or got hired elsewhere, they consider those
still a success. A number of individuals are under the poverty level, many have not
had any college courses. The first 3 college courses the City has paid through grant
funding and to get them on a career path. They have had some that decided security
or corrections is a better path, they still consider that a success because it is a