Another accusation of police misconduct reopens
the old rift between cops and residents at south
Minneapolis's Little Earth housing complex
BY G.R. ANDERSON JR.
An evening rain has just cleared, and some of the residents of Little Earth are emerging from their apartments to enjoy the summer night. Vinnie, a 36-year-old mother of four, is out for a stroll along the grounds of the low-income housing complex, just east of Cedar Avenue South, in the 2500 block. Like most of the residents of Little Earth, Vinnie is American Indian. She's lived at the complex for about a year.
It's just after 8:00 p.m. on a Saturday, and Vinnie is feeling cheerful in spite of the previous year's troubles, incurred since she moved to town from South Dakota. She came to take care of her mother, a longtime Little Earth resident who is recovering from a kidney transplant. Just a couple of weeks back, she found herself at the business end of a knife in a confrontation with neighbors who had been harassing her mother.
And the rest of the family—well, that's why she's carrying her two- year-old niece with her as she walks. "Her mom and dad are smoking crack right now," Vinnie explains. "They smoke it right in front of her. I'm like, it's my niece. I don't want her smelling that shit."
Vinnie tells this with the assurance that her real name won't be used; retaliation for speaking out about anything is commonplace at Little Earth. The baby's parents live in the apartment next door to Vinnie's, in a row of dwellings that face south toward what used to be 25 1/2 Street, but recently was renamed E.M. Stately Street after one of the people who initiated plans for the housing complex more than 35 years ago. There's a steady stream of folks going in and out of both apartments, a flimsy storm door clattering behind them.
"Weed, cocaine, crack," Vinnie continues, ticking off the drugs of choice—aside from alcohol—found at Little Earth. "People go to the hospital and get drugs and sell them. You can get a Percocet for three dollars, and a Vicodin for four."
There's a pause. Rain clouds still linger, bringing an early darkness. Suddenly there are kids everywhere, riding dirt bikes on sidewalks and makeshift paths all around the complex. Teenagers dressed in athletic jerseys, ball caps, and blue bandanas roam about in groups, teasing, roughhousing, and flirting with each other. Many of them have been drinking; some are in local gangs. Several older adolescent girls are pushing babies in strollers.
Someone lights off some fireworks in the distance. "I hear shootings every weekend," Vinnie says, prompted by the rat-a-tat pops outside. "This will go on all night, and something will happen. Every weekend, they light off the fireworks just to fuck people up, so pretty soon you can't tell what's a real gun and what isn't."
In early June, Little Earth was briefly in the news following the public disclosure of an incident on Friday, May 26, involving the Minneapolis Police Department. That Memorial Day weekend had been unseasonably hot in the city. According to a police report, later verified by surveillance footage), cops arrived at Little Earth shortly after 7:00 that evening to break up a fight. After a long conversation with the two officers, Lt. Rick Thomas and Lt. Michael Fossum, one of the brawlers tried to flee, and was immediately handcuffed.
Over the course of the next few minutes, the suspect, identified as Juan Trinidad Vasquez, and the two officers somehow remained out of sight of the 32 security cameras scattered about the complex. When they reappeared on surveillance video, one officer was walking a handcuffed Vasquez to a squad car. The other officer approached and bumped into Vasquez, who doubled over as though he'd received a blow to the mid-section. Onlookers say Vasquez passed out. Though Vasquez was, according to the tape and the incident report, given "medical treatment," many eyewitnesses claimed that he was detained in the back of a squad on a hot day by himself—windows up, AC off—for some 30 minutes.
Both of the officers implicated in the episode were put on paid leave while the MPD and the FBI conducted investigations. They returned to their jobs June 24 in a "non-enforcement capacity" while the case remains open. Vasquez, a 24-year-old American Indian-Latino who does not live at Little Earth, was charged with a narcotics violation (the incident report notes the officers observed him "with a baggie of suspected crack cocaine").
The incident was made public 11 days later when Little Earth executive director Bill Ziegler held a press conference outside the complex's administrative offices. Ziegler was joined there by MPD interim Chief Tim Dolan, Deputy Chief Lucy Gerold, and Third Precinct Inspector Scott Gerlicher. About 100 residents, activists, and journalists showed up as well. "We have worked to make Little Earth a safe, hope-filled community," Ziegler began on a conciliatory note, praising the response of Dolan and Gerlicher. "We cannot allow this incident to destroy the relationship we've developed with the Minneapolis Police Department."
If Ziegler, who has been on the job for all of 18 months, was trying to walk a fine line, it didn't work. His apparently cozy relationship with the cops infuriated some Indian activists who have long viewed the MPD as a mortal enemy. The press, meanwhile, wanted to know why Ziegler wasn't making the tape of the incident public. "Does everyone want to see a big Indian uprising here?" he countered. "How would that help the residents? You don't live here. You'll all go home to the suburbs. You aren't stuck with the fallout from your reports."
There was also a split between the activists who were angry with the cops and those residents who sided with Ziegler's decision, and a fight nearly broke out. The next day, Clyde Bellecourt, the longtime Indian activist who had a huge hand in shaping Little Earth in its infancy, held a similarly contentious press conference. He called for the termination of Lt. Rick Thomas, and the release of the surveillance tape. Within two hours, Ziegler, citing "ongoing tension," gave out DVD copies of the tape.
But a day's delay was enough to feed the suspicion and hostility of many Little Earth residents toward the police. Though Ziegler, Dolan, and Gerlicher all say the MPD's relations with the complex have never been better, a bad history runs deep.
News accounts from the pages of the Minneapolis Star and the Minneapolis Tribune in the 1970s and '80s record a number of nameless, faceless criminal incidents ranging from assaults and murders to allegations, some subsequently confirmed, of police brutality. The past 15 years have included a number of highly publicized allegations of police wrongdoing in connection with Little Earth:
• In July 1993, a pair of MPD officers were accused of putting two Native Americans, one a Little Earth resident, in the trunk of their squad car before taking them to detox. Then-Chief John Laux drew praise for his actions, which included suspending one officer, Marvin Schumer, for 90 days without pay, and another, Michael Lardy, for 20 days without pay. The two men, Charles Lone Eagle and John Boney, were awarded $100,000 each in a subsequent civil rights suit.
• In December of that year, a 16-year-old boy at the complex was wounded by a gunshot from a cop after he waved a "realistic-looking replica" of a handgun at a cop. One officer, Anthony Diioia, was working off-duty and in uniform at Little Earth; another, David E. Campbell, was out of uniform and helping Diioia on an unrelated case. As Campbell approached a group of youths, one boy pulled out the toy gun. Both officers fired, according to news clips, wounding the boy. It was never clear which officer shot the 16-year-old. According to the StarTribune it was the "first violence at Little Earth in quite some time."
• In March 1994, two officers were accused of kidnapping a man they had stopped for a driving violation at Little Earth. According to the Star Tribune, the two cops, Richard Gonion and Malcolm Johnson, allegedly offered to let Tesfai Kashai Dirar go if he paid them $300. The officers, according to news accounts, were arrested in handcuffs at the 3rd Precinct and forced to turn in their weapons and badges. (The officers eventually pled guilty to misconduct and resigned.) City leaders decried the situation, but shirked responsibility. "I can't police from City Hall. John Laux can't supervise from City Hall," then-Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton told reporters. "These officers have failed us."
• In September 2002, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court, MPD officers broke down the door of an apartment and allegedly proceeded to kick and batter several residents in the process of throwing them to the floor and handcuffing them. One woman, Danielle Long Crow, who was eight months pregnant, was purportedly yanked from the shower and forced to lie naked and stomach-down on the floor, the complaint says. The suit, which was eventually settled for $60,000, named as one of the defendants Lt. Richard Thomas—the same Rick Thomas who was a party to the May 26 incident this year. An MPD internal investigation apparently cleared Thomas of any wrongdoing in the department's eyes; his personnel file indicates he was never disciplined for the Long Crow incident.
• In January 2003, two MPD cops were accused of urinating on an intoxicated man and then leaving him and his female companion outside in freezing temperatures at a Little Earth parking lot off Ogema Place. "We've got a good thing going and then wham, this happens," then-Chief Robert Olson said at the time. "It's just disheartening." Clyde Bellecourt roared at a subsequent press conference, "What happened in our community would never take place at Hennepin and Lake or Edina or Bloomington."
Unfortunately for the MPD, the collective memory at Little Earth is uncommonly long. "We're a tight-knit group," says one resident. "And with that comes old wounds that never heal."
Little Earth is often mistaken for an inner-city reservation, a characterization that pisses off many residents and local Indians. They call it "the compound." It is actually public housing, devised in 1971 as a low-income enclave operated by American Indians. Initially, it was just Section 8 housing funded by the federal Model City program and the Housing and Urban Development office. By 1973 it opened, with one news account quoting a building manager saying that "A strong effort has been made to keep the complex from becoming an Indian ghetto." But almost immediately the complex faced money problems. Over the years, it has survived a number of financial distresses, the prospect of imminent foreclosure, and an 11-year lawsuit with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
It is often referred to as the only urban Indian housing complex in America, and to a large degree that's true: Some 96 percent of current residents are Native American. But it's also open to anyone who qualifies for Section 8 housing and can get approved from a waiting list. It features 212 units—efficiencies, one- and two-bedroom apartments, and townhouses with as many as four or five bedrooms. The rents are based on tenants' incomes, which are usually meager. According to Little Earth's official numbers, some 800 residents live there, but even Bill Ziegler concedes that the number is more than 1,000, and some residents say it gets as high as 3,000, with relatives and friends regularly crashing there—sometimes for long periods.
As Faith Bad Moccasin, who is 66 years old and has lived there for 10 years, puts it: "It's the Indian way to take care of your family, but a week turns into two months, and pretty soon the bad elements are living next door."
What this brings is a sense that outsiders, not residents, are inflicting problems on Little Earth. But the first identified American Indian gang in contemporary Minnesota, the Naturals, started here in 1979. Since then, there have been various offshoots of what are historically considered black gangs, like the Native Gangster Disciples and the Native Vice Lords. And there is something to the notion that people come from reservations in search of work or whatever else in the city and end up squatting at Little Earth.
But there is also an element of conflict between residents of different tribal backgrounds. Over the years, as Little Earth has become predominantly Indian, it has historically been Ojibwe-dominated. In recent years, however, members of other tribes, such as Lakota Indians, have moved in, and there are divisions between the differing bands. "But natives want to live among natives," says one resident, "and that's why I live here."
In recent years, as south Minneapolis has seen an influx of Mexican immigrants, the face of Little Earth has changed slightly as Indian and Latino cultures gravitated toward each other. "They're both indigenous peoples," notes Vince Hill, an Ojibwe reporter for the Native American Press/Ojibwe News, "but now you see native tongues dying out"—in some cases replaced by Spanish, or the collective tongue of poor America, hip-hop vernacular.
Geographically, "the compound" comprises a couple of parcels of land in a neighborhood now known as East Phillips, bordered by 24th and 26th streets on the south and north ends, and 18th and Hiawatha Avenues on the west and east. A pedestrian bridge, the main visual element of Little Earth, arches over Cedar Avenue. There are six or seven clusters of sloping, stucco buildings in the west side of the complex. It's not hard to imagine Little Earth as decent public housing, at least cosmetically, back in the day. There are patios, and gates, and patches of yard in some of the clusters. There's a bucolic park on the west side of Cedar Avenue—which runs right through the heart of Little Earth—that appears to epitomize what urban green space can do for a community, complete with playground equipment, public grills, and towering trees. The units on the west side were rehabbed and fitted with central air conditioning units not long ago.
They don't have central air on the east side of Cedar. But they do have a security center, as well as a majority of the compound's 32 surveillance cameras. The dwellings on Ogema Place (the name is Ojibwe for "king" or "leader") have a pervasive air of poverty. They face east toward a high retaining wall that's part of Hiawatha Avenue. On the ground, there are wrecked cars, broken screens, fast-food litter, and an occasional lampshade or abandoned Styrofoam cooler. Judging from the forensic evidence scattered everywhere, the canned beverages of choice include Diet Coke, Bud Ice, and Colt 45.
East side or west, the one unifying theme at Little Earth, besides native heritage, is poverty. Some 80 percent of households are led by single mothers, according to estimates of those who live and work there. "Of the families and individuals currently occupying the units," according to a current Little Earth press release, "99 percent are very low income and 1 percent are low income." Further, "69 percent of the households have annual incomes less than $10,000."
As of 2000, the official population of Census Tract 73.01, which encompasses Little Earth, was 1,733 people in 485 households. Of the roughly 400 renter households, 225 had no car, 206 were below the federal poverty line, 95 were on public assistance, and 49 had no phone service. Demographically, some 1,500 residents were American Indian or mixed-race. More than 58 percent were under the age of 18, and just 11 percent older than 45. Married couples made up only 18 percent of the population, single mothers 45 percent. And of the 950 residents over the age of 16, 9 percent were unemployed and another 41 percent were "not in the labor force"—making for an effective unemployment rate of 50 percent. About 96 percent of the households made less than $25,000 a year.
Going back a decade, MPD maps of violent crime in the area for 1996 and 1997 show a steady wave of aggravated assault, rape, domestic assault, and a handful of homicides. In 1998, some 2,373 serious crimes—such as aggravated assault, rape, or murder—occurred in the Phillips neighborhood, which was a huge part of town before it was split into four separate neighborhoods. A good quarter of those crimes, by MPD estimates, happened near or at Little Earth. (That figure for all of Phillips nearly doubles the total in impoverished north side areas like Jordan and Hawthorne during the same period.)
In 2001, the MPD started keeping statistics for Phillips East, which is a more precise sample, an eight-block area that consists mostly of Little Earth. There were 320 reported crimes in the area that year alone. And nearly every resident recalls a period of slightly longer than six months, from November 2004 to June 2005, when there were five homicides on the Little Earth grounds. Little Earth used to have private security patrol the complex, but for nearly a decade now, off-duty MPD cops have been hired to do so.
"I made 20 calls a night," says Martha Fast Horse of her days working as a dispatcher at Little Earth. (Residents at the complex are hired to monitor security cameras and call police when necessary.) "And you have to make them, even though you know you'll be a target. Otherwise you get the feeling that this stuff will never end."
Rick Thomas, a 25-year MPD veteran, has patrolled Little Earth for several years. Nearly everyone at Little Earth knows him, and he surely knows the place better than most outsiders. He's been there to apply the community-policing touch, too—working with youth programs and sitting in on regular meetings with a Little Earth crime committee.
Thomas, like the MPD itself, inspires vehement if surprisingly varied reactions from the people who live there. Take the 2002 Long Crow episode: Not everybody at Little Earth was outraged by the raid. "I went without sleep for two years living next door to them," attests 30-year resident Lori Ellis of the Long Crows. "Those were types of problems that Rick was good at dealing with.
"I think he just had too much on his plate," she says of Thomas's alleged misconduct. "He's been very effective in dealing with crack houses here, and he's often here overnight. I can understand why something would go wrong." She stops short of a hearty endorsement, though. In general, Ellis says, "I am in-between on Thomas and the cops. I don't have nothing bad to say about them. But I wouldn't use the word 'love' either. I don't know that we're that close."
(Thomas declined to comment to City Pages about the May 26 Vazquez incident, citing MPD policy that forbids officers to discuss ongoing investigations.)
Thomas "has done a lot for the community," wrote Martha Fast Horse in a recent letter to MPD acting Chief Tim Dolan. She went on to recount a 2004 incident involving a group of kids who had beaten up her 15-year-old son. Afterward, "I went over to their unit and nearly knocked the door down pounding on it," Fast Horse wrote. "I am not ashamed to admit that I am a mother bear when it comes to my children, and I was ready to do battle with the whole group. They called the police on me. Rick showed up to save their lives. So, nobody can tell me that he doesn't care about all people equally, even the gang members.
"From where I stood, I could see him coming from the 2501 building where the police substation is housed," Fast Horse continues. "He looked tired like he had been up working all night; I later found out that was in fact the truth. He walked up to me and said, 'Doesn't this ever end?'"
At the same time, numerous younger residents can recall unpleasant run-ins with Thomas. Some of them call him "Mr. Bigguns" in sneering testament to his swagger. "What he does, it creates a lot of tension," says 27-year-old Isaac Dennis St. Clair-Jones, a lifelong resident of Little Earth.
Joho Ellis, who's part of a very distinct minority as an African American living at Little Earth—he lives with his Ojibwe girlfriend—says he's seen Thomas around plenty. "I know him," he chortles. He declines to say more about Thomas specifically, then adds: "Look, most people get out of hand here. But I gotta keep it clean because my friends are black. Too many black people outside my place, and the cops show up. Every time."
Make no mistake: There are a lot of people at Little Earth who despise the cops utterly. (One 19-year-old woman tells me that MPD cops are "the harassers of all native people.") But most residents make at least a practical accommodation with the MPD. They agree among themselves that the problems at Little Earth are so pervasive and so intractable that a police presence is required; they also seem to concur that shoddy treatment at the hands of the MPD is a way of life, the price of the ticket for getting law enforcement when you need it. "There is a fine line between the enforcement that people demand," says Bill Means, an American Indian representative on the city's Police Community Relations Council, "and brutality that comes with that enforcement."
Still, residents call the police when there is serious trouble, even though a certain portion of the callers have outstanding warrants for their own arrest. It happened once to John Goose, 39, who has lived at Little Earth since 1999. "There's a lot of gang activity here," he notes. He called the cops one night earlier this year to report shots fired. By the time they showed up, he had gotten into a fight with his wife—who promptly won that round by telling officers her husband had never paid the fines on a 2003 DWI. Goose spent a month in the county workhouse for that offense.
"Do I regret that I called the cops?" he asks now. "No, man. I wanted the cops here. Tell the truth, I did the right thing. I protected my children and did my time. I don't have to look over my shoulder no more."
One of the more brutal memories MPD Sgt. David Burbank carries around from his days patrolling Little Earth involved the fatal cocaine overdose of a 12-year-old girl. "That's the sad reality of that place," Burbank notes. "How the heck does a 12-year-old get a hold of cocaine, let alone a lethal dose?"
Burbank, who is a Chippewa Indian, worked a beat that included Little Earth for more than two and a half years. During that time, a stint that concluded in October 2005, he was also a member of a local law enforcement consortium called the Native American Gang Task Force. By his own admission, his native status did little to get locals to open up to him. "The biggest problem is that it's always difficult to get somebody to come forward," Burbank says. "Gaining trust is the biggest obstacle."
The feeling is pretty much mutual. When he patrolled the place, Burbank remembers, "You're always looking around. You can see that [gangs] have little scouts out. You show up and there's movement all about the complex, and it's always like, 'where is he going?'"
Burbank says he agrees with residents that much of the criminal element at Little Earth stems from outside forces, not residents. Even so, he notes, gangs constantly jockey for turf at the complex: the Native Mob, Native Gangster Disciples, Native Vice Lords, Project Boyz, and MAKK MOB—which stands for Money Associated Kold-Hearted Killers, Money Over Bitches.
It's the last two, Burbank claims, that have led to a recent uptick in crimes. "It's the 15-to-17-year-old set of kids that claim to be in gangs, but they're really just about trying to act like it," Burbank says, adding that the Project Boyz in particular practice a sort of "guerrilla warfare" without much regard for consequences or codes of conduct. If anything, this spells more random violence than old-school gang activity: "In the Native Mob," he notes, "before you actually tried to do something, you had to ask a higher-up beforehand."
Burbank recalls incidents that still trouble him. One was a double homicide in November 2004 that everyone at Little Earth still talks about, the killing of two Project Boyz by members of the Native Mob. Despite the anguish it caused in the community, he recalls, there was very little cooperation from residents. The police only got one conviction out of the killing, which in turn further damaged the MPD's credibility among American Indians in the city.
Kids regularly play on their elders' historic animosity toward police, Burbank claims: "I confront the kids, and they know what's going on. They tell their grandparents, and turn it into a conflict with the police. So if we even ask anybody what's going on, it becomes that. Cops messing with them. They're just pulling the wool over their parents' eyes.
"In a way, it's a game," Burbank continues. "We're just a piece of the puzzle. There's a lack of male role models, and there's no one there to talk to them. The kids behave bad, and we have to talk to them."
Burbank transferred to another position with the MPD when his stint with the gang task force was up, even though he could have stayed on. "I try to be as professional as I can be, but you have to have your guard up the whole time," he says. "Everyone's looking at you. You can know one household, and the next day you've got to arrest four of their next-door neighbors. You try not to let that influence the relationship you have with the family you know. It does take its toll."
Burbank sees the problems at Little Earth as intractable, the kind of troubles police have no way to solve. By the time he left the assignment, "I was at the end of my rope. You feel like you're moving in circles. You clean up one part, and then something happens somewhere else."
Acting MPD Chief Tim Dolan maintains that the department only puts its best and brightest on the job at places like Little Earth. "If you're cynical about answering calls to a place like that, we're not going to put you there," Dolan says, adding that he patrolled there in the early 1980s. "There was an attraction when I was working there. The most ambitious cops wanted to work there. It was troubling, and difficult, but ultimately rewarding. They are a proud people, and if the cops were hustling, they appreciated it." And it's working, he adds, citing as evidence a trend toward fewer crimes, yet more calls to police, at the complex in recent years. (By the MPD's own accounting, however, "calls to service" have tapered off there recently, while crimes involving theft, assault, narcotics, or murder have increased. In 2002, the total number of serious crimes reported was 73; in 2005, it was 92.)
"It's not any different than some of the other areas around town," Dolan says of the place. "I'd say 99 percent of the people there are just trying to get along."
Getting along at Little Earth is often a full-time job. Lifelong resident Isaac Dennis St. Clair-Jones recalls his own experiences with crime and cops at Little Earth. When he was 12, he claims, his head was bashed into a brick wall by a cop on the northwest side of the complex. His offense? He had laughed out loud with a group of friends after the officer had slipped on some ice. "I always wanted to be a cop, too, but not after that," he says.
St. Clair-Jones got involved in a gang at Little Earth, but got out a few years ago, he says, because he has two children now. Tonight he's "smoked a couple fatties" and plans to chill at home with his family. He recalls an incident last summer when his children, who are seven and nine, were sleeping in the front room of their apartment with some of their cousins. At about 4:00 a.m., St. Clair-Jones says, a gunshot blew out the window, and glass shattered all over the kids.
"I pulled the slug out of the wall, and it looked like a .357," he says, adding that he learned later it was a gang shooting gone awry. "I wrapped the thing in a bag and took it to the police station. The cop just looked at me and threw it in the garbage."
He motions toward a gathering of teenagers nearby who are swilling from a bottle of brandy. "It was probably one of those guys," he says.
Two of them are from Little Earth originally, though they now live in Roseville. They both look to be about 17, and they come to Little Earth to party on the weekends.
"I had to get out of here," one of them explains without any hint of irony. Pretty soon he and rest of the group drift off into the recesses of the clusters of apartments, looking for a party where there's booze.
A little while later they reappear nearby, not far from where Vinnie is cradling her niece. "I have an uncle in Lincoln, Nebraska," she says wistfully, prompted by nothing in particular. Right now she's taking classes to become a nurse. "I have to get out of here, as soon as I can," she says. "These projects are no good."
source: http://citypages.com/databank/27/1338/article14559.asp
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Little Earth - City Pages 2006
Another accusation of police misconduct reopens
the old rift between cops and residents at south
Minneapolis's Little Earth housing complex
BY G.R. ANDERSON JR.
An evening rain has just cleared, and some of the residents of Little Earth are emerging from their apartments to enjoy the summer night. Vinnie, a 36-year-old mother of four, is out for a stroll along the grounds of the low-income housing complex, just east of Cedar Avenue South, in the 2500 block. Like most of the residents of Little Earth, Vinnie is American Indian. She's lived at the complex for about a year.
It's just after 8:00 p.m. on a Saturday, and Vinnie is feeling cheerful in spite of the previous year's troubles, incurred since she moved to town from South Dakota. She came to take care of her mother, a longtime Little Earth resident who is recovering from a kidney transplant. Just a couple of weeks back, she found herself at the business end of a knife in a confrontation with neighbors who had been harassing her mother.
And the rest of the family—well, that's why she's carrying her two- year-old niece with her as she walks. "Her mom and dad are smoking crack right now," Vinnie explains. "They smoke it right in front of her. I'm like, it's my niece. I don't want her smelling that shit."
Vinnie tells this with the assurance that her real name won't be used; retaliation for speaking out about anything is commonplace at Little Earth. The baby's parents live in the apartment next door to Vinnie's, in a row of dwellings that face south toward what used to be 25 1/2 Street, but recently was renamed E.M. Stately Street after one of the people who initiated plans for the housing complex more than 35 years ago. There's a steady stream of folks going in and out of both apartments, a flimsy storm door clattering behind them.
"Weed, cocaine, crack," Vinnie continues, ticking off the drugs of choice—aside from alcohol—found at Little Earth. "People go to the hospital and get drugs and sell them. You can get a Percocet for three dollars, and a Vicodin for four."
There's a pause. Rain clouds still linger, bringing an early darkness. Suddenly there are kids everywhere, riding dirt bikes on sidewalks and makeshift paths all around the complex. Teenagers dressed in athletic jerseys, ball caps, and blue bandanas roam about in groups, teasing, roughhousing, and flirting with each other. Many of them have been drinking; some are in local gangs. Several older adolescent girls are pushing babies in strollers.
Someone lights off some fireworks in the distance. "I hear shootings every weekend," Vinnie says, prompted by the rat-a-tat pops outside. "This will go on all night, and something will happen. Every weekend, they light off the fireworks just to fuck people up, so pretty soon you can't tell what's a real gun and what isn't."
In early June, Little Earth was briefly in the news following the public disclosure of an incident on Friday, May 26, involving the Minneapolis Police Department. That Memorial Day weekend had been unseasonably hot in the city. According to a police report, later verified by surveillance footage), cops arrived at Little Earth shortly after 7:00 that evening to break up a fight. After a long conversation with the two officers, Lt. Rick Thomas and Lt. Michael Fossum, one of the brawlers tried to flee, and was immediately handcuffed.
Over the course of the next few minutes, the suspect, identified as Juan Trinidad Vasquez, and the two officers somehow remained out of sight of the 32 security cameras scattered about the complex. When they reappeared on surveillance video, one officer was walking a handcuffed Vasquez to a squad car. The other officer approached and bumped into Vasquez, who doubled over as though he'd received a blow to the mid-section. Onlookers say Vasquez passed out. Though Vasquez was, according to the tape and the incident report, given "medical treatment," many eyewitnesses claimed that he was detained in the back of a squad on a hot day by himself—windows up, AC off—for some 30 minutes.
Both of the officers implicated in the episode were put on paid leave while the MPD and the FBI conducted investigations. They returned to their jobs June 24 in a "non-enforcement capacity" while the case remains open. Vasquez, a 24-year-old American Indian-Latino who does not live at Little Earth, was charged with a narcotics violation (the incident report notes the officers observed him "with a baggie of suspected crack cocaine").
The incident was made public 11 days later when Little Earth executive director Bill Ziegler held a press conference outside the complex's administrative offices. Ziegler was joined there by MPD interim Chief Tim Dolan, Deputy Chief Lucy Gerold, and Third Precinct Inspector Scott Gerlicher. About 100 residents, activists, and journalists showed up as well. "We have worked to make Little Earth a safe, hope-filled community," Ziegler began on a conciliatory note, praising the response of Dolan and Gerlicher. "We cannot allow this incident to destroy the relationship we've developed with the Minneapolis Police Department."
If Ziegler, who has been on the job for all of 18 months, was trying to walk a fine line, it didn't work. His apparently cozy relationship with the cops infuriated some Indian activists who have long viewed the MPD as a mortal enemy. The press, meanwhile, wanted to know why Ziegler wasn't making the tape of the incident public. "Does everyone want to see a big Indian uprising here?" he countered. "How would that help the residents? You don't live here. You'll all go home to the suburbs. You aren't stuck with the fallout from your reports."
There was also a split between the activists who were angry with the cops and those residents who sided with Ziegler's decision, and a fight nearly broke out. The next day, Clyde Bellecourt, the longtime Indian activist who had a huge hand in shaping Little Earth in its infancy, held a similarly contentious press conference. He called for the termination of Lt. Rick Thomas, and the release of the surveillance tape. Within two hours, Ziegler, citing "ongoing tension," gave out DVD copies of the tape.
But a day's delay was enough to feed the suspicion and hostility of many Little Earth residents toward the police. Though Ziegler, Dolan, and Gerlicher all say the MPD's relations with the complex have never been better, a bad history runs deep.
News accounts from the pages of the Minneapolis Star and the Minneapolis Tribune in the 1970s and '80s record a number of nameless, faceless criminal incidents ranging from assaults and murders to allegations, some subsequently confirmed, of police brutality. The past 15 years have included a number of highly publicized allegations of police wrongdoing in connection with Little Earth:
• In July 1993, a pair of MPD officers were accused of putting two Native Americans, one a Little Earth resident, in the trunk of their squad car before taking them to detox. Then-Chief John Laux drew praise for his actions, which included suspending one officer, Marvin Schumer, for 90 days without pay, and another, Michael Lardy, for 20 days without pay. The two men, Charles Lone Eagle and John Boney, were awarded $100,000 each in a subsequent civil rights suit.
• In December of that year, a 16-year-old boy at the complex was wounded by a gunshot from a cop after he waved a "realistic-looking replica" of a handgun at a cop. One officer, Anthony Diioia, was working off-duty and in uniform at Little Earth; another, David E. Campbell, was out of uniform and helping Diioia on an unrelated case. As Campbell approached a group of youths, one boy pulled out the toy gun. Both officers fired, according to news clips, wounding the boy. It was never clear which officer shot the 16-year-old. According to the StarTribune it was the "first violence at Little Earth in quite some time."
• In March 1994, two officers were accused of kidnapping a man they had stopped for a driving violation at Little Earth. According to the Star Tribune, the two cops, Richard Gonion and Malcolm Johnson, allegedly offered to let Tesfai Kashai Dirar go if he paid them $300. The officers, according to news accounts, were arrested in handcuffs at the 3rd Precinct and forced to turn in their weapons and badges. (The officers eventually pled guilty to misconduct and resigned.) City leaders decried the situation, but shirked responsibility. "I can't police from City Hall. John Laux can't supervise from City Hall," then-Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton told reporters. "These officers have failed us."
• In September 2002, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court, MPD officers broke down the door of an apartment and allegedly proceeded to kick and batter several residents in the process of throwing them to the floor and handcuffing them. One woman, Danielle Long Crow, who was eight months pregnant, was purportedly yanked from the shower and forced to lie naked and stomach-down on the floor, the complaint says. The suit, which was eventually settled for $60,000, named as one of the defendants Lt. Richard Thomas—the same Rick Thomas who was a party to the May 26 incident this year. An MPD internal investigation apparently cleared Thomas of any wrongdoing in the department's eyes; his personnel file indicates he was never disciplined for the Long Crow incident.
• In January 2003, two MPD cops were accused of urinating on an intoxicated man and then leaving him and his female companion outside in freezing temperatures at a Little Earth parking lot off Ogema Place. "We've got a good thing going and then wham, this happens," then-Chief Robert Olson said at the time. "It's just disheartening." Clyde Bellecourt roared at a subsequent press conference, "What happened in our community would never take place at Hennepin and Lake or Edina or Bloomington."
Unfortunately for the MPD, the collective memory at Little Earth is uncommonly long. "We're a tight-knit group," says one resident. "And with that comes old wounds that never heal."
Little Earth is often mistaken for an inner-city reservation, a characterization that pisses off many residents and local Indians. They call it "the compound." It is actually public housing, devised in 1971 as a low-income enclave operated by American Indians. Initially, it was just Section 8 housing funded by the federal Model City program and the Housing and Urban Development office. By 1973 it opened, with one news account quoting a building manager saying that "A strong effort has been made to keep the complex from becoming an Indian ghetto." But almost immediately the complex faced money problems. Over the years, it has survived a number of financial distresses, the prospect of imminent foreclosure, and an 11-year lawsuit with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
It is often referred to as the only urban Indian housing complex in America, and to a large degree that's true: Some 96 percent of current residents are Native American. But it's also open to anyone who qualifies for Section 8 housing and can get approved from a waiting list. It features 212 units—efficiencies, one- and two-bedroom apartments, and townhouses with as many as four or five bedrooms. The rents are based on tenants' incomes, which are usually meager. According to Little Earth's official numbers, some 800 residents live there, but even Bill Ziegler concedes that the number is more than 1,000, and some residents say it gets as high as 3,000, with relatives and friends regularly crashing there—sometimes for long periods.
As Faith Bad Moccasin, who is 66 years old and has lived there for 10 years, puts it: "It's the Indian way to take care of your family, but a week turns into two months, and pretty soon the bad elements are living next door."
What this brings is a sense that outsiders, not residents, are inflicting problems on Little Earth. But the first identified American Indian gang in contemporary Minnesota, the Naturals, started here in 1979. Since then, there have been various offshoots of what are historically considered black gangs, like the Native Gangster Disciples and the Native Vice Lords. And there is something to the notion that people come from reservations in search of work or whatever else in the city and end up squatting at Little Earth.
But there is also an element of conflict between residents of different tribal backgrounds. Over the years, as Little Earth has become predominantly Indian, it has historically been Ojibwe-dominated. In recent years, however, members of other tribes, such as Lakota Indians, have moved in, and there are divisions between the differing bands. "But natives want to live among natives," says one resident, "and that's why I live here."
In recent years, as south Minneapolis has seen an influx of Mexican immigrants, the face of Little Earth has changed slightly as Indian and Latino cultures gravitated toward each other. "They're both indigenous peoples," notes Vince Hill, an Ojibwe reporter for the Native American Press/Ojibwe News, "but now you see native tongues dying out"—in some cases replaced by Spanish, or the collective tongue of poor America, hip-hop vernacular.
Geographically, "the compound" comprises a couple of parcels of land in a neighborhood now known as East Phillips, bordered by 24th and 26th streets on the south and north ends, and 18th and Hiawatha Avenues on the west and east. A pedestrian bridge, the main visual element of Little Earth, arches over Cedar Avenue. There are six or seven clusters of sloping, stucco buildings in the west side of the complex. It's not hard to imagine Little Earth as decent public housing, at least cosmetically, back in the day. There are patios, and gates, and patches of yard in some of the clusters. There's a bucolic park on the west side of Cedar Avenue—which runs right through the heart of Little Earth—that appears to epitomize what urban green space can do for a community, complete with playground equipment, public grills, and towering trees. The units on the west side were rehabbed and fitted with central air conditioning units not long ago.
They don't have central air on the east side of Cedar. But they do have a security center, as well as a majority of the compound's 32 surveillance cameras. The dwellings on Ogema Place (the name is Ojibwe for "king" or "leader") have a pervasive air of poverty. They face east toward a high retaining wall that's part of Hiawatha Avenue. On the ground, there are wrecked cars, broken screens, fast-food litter, and an occasional lampshade or abandoned Styrofoam cooler. Judging from the forensic evidence scattered everywhere, the canned beverages of choice include Diet Coke, Bud Ice, and Colt 45.
East side or west, the one unifying theme at Little Earth, besides native heritage, is poverty. Some 80 percent of households are led by single mothers, according to estimates of those who live and work there. "Of the families and individuals currently occupying the units," according to a current Little Earth press release, "99 percent are very low income and 1 percent are low income." Further, "69 percent of the households have annual incomes less than $10,000."
As of 2000, the official population of Census Tract 73.01, which encompasses Little Earth, was 1,733 people in 485 households. Of the roughly 400 renter households, 225 had no car, 206 were below the federal poverty line, 95 were on public assistance, and 49 had no phone service. Demographically, some 1,500 residents were American Indian or mixed-race. More than 58 percent were under the age of 18, and just 11 percent older than 45. Married couples made up only 18 percent of the population, single mothers 45 percent. And of the 950 residents over the age of 16, 9 percent were unemployed and another 41 percent were "not in the labor force"—making for an effective unemployment rate of 50 percent. About 96 percent of the households made less than $25,000 a year.
Going back a decade, MPD maps of violent crime in the area for 1996 and 1997 show a steady wave of aggravated assault, rape, domestic assault, and a handful of homicides. In 1998, some 2,373 serious crimes—such as aggravated assault, rape, or murder—occurred in the Phillips neighborhood, which was a huge part of town before it was split into four separate neighborhoods. A good quarter of those crimes, by MPD estimates, happened near or at Little Earth. (That figure for all of Phillips nearly doubles the total in impoverished north side areas like Jordan and Hawthorne during the same period.)
In 2001, the MPD started keeping statistics for Phillips East, which is a more precise sample, an eight-block area that consists mostly of Little Earth. There were 320 reported crimes in the area that year alone. And nearly every resident recalls a period of slightly longer than six months, from November 2004 to June 2005, when there were five homicides on the Little Earth grounds. Little Earth used to have private security patrol the complex, but for nearly a decade now, off-duty MPD cops have been hired to do so.
"I made 20 calls a night," says Martha Fast Horse of her days working as a dispatcher at Little Earth. (Residents at the complex are hired to monitor security cameras and call police when necessary.) "And you have to make them, even though you know you'll be a target. Otherwise you get the feeling that this stuff will never end."
Rick Thomas, a 25-year MPD veteran, has patrolled Little Earth for several years. Nearly everyone at Little Earth knows him, and he surely knows the place better than most outsiders. He's been there to apply the community-policing touch, too—working with youth programs and sitting in on regular meetings with a Little Earth crime committee.
Thomas, like the MPD itself, inspires vehement if surprisingly varied reactions from the people who live there. Take the 2002 Long Crow episode: Not everybody at Little Earth was outraged by the raid. "I went without sleep for two years living next door to them," attests 30-year resident Lori Ellis of the Long Crows. "Those were types of problems that Rick was good at dealing with.
"I think he just had too much on his plate," she says of Thomas's alleged misconduct. "He's been very effective in dealing with crack houses here, and he's often here overnight. I can understand why something would go wrong." She stops short of a hearty endorsement, though. In general, Ellis says, "I am in-between on Thomas and the cops. I don't have nothing bad to say about them. But I wouldn't use the word 'love' either. I don't know that we're that close."
(Thomas declined to comment to City Pages about the May 26 Vazquez incident, citing MPD policy that forbids officers to discuss ongoing investigations.)
Thomas "has done a lot for the community," wrote Martha Fast Horse in a recent letter to MPD acting Chief Tim Dolan. She went on to recount a 2004 incident involving a group of kids who had beaten up her 15-year-old son. Afterward, "I went over to their unit and nearly knocked the door down pounding on it," Fast Horse wrote. "I am not ashamed to admit that I am a mother bear when it comes to my children, and I was ready to do battle with the whole group. They called the police on me. Rick showed up to save their lives. So, nobody can tell me that he doesn't care about all people equally, even the gang members.
"From where I stood, I could see him coming from the 2501 building where the police substation is housed," Fast Horse continues. "He looked tired like he had been up working all night; I later found out that was in fact the truth. He walked up to me and said, 'Doesn't this ever end?'"
At the same time, numerous younger residents can recall unpleasant run-ins with Thomas. Some of them call him "Mr. Bigguns" in sneering testament to his swagger. "What he does, it creates a lot of tension," says 27-year-old Isaac Dennis St. Clair-Jones, a lifelong resident of Little Earth.
Joho Ellis, who's part of a very distinct minority as an African American living at Little Earth—he lives with his Ojibwe girlfriend—says he's seen Thomas around plenty. "I know him," he chortles. He declines to say more about Thomas specifically, then adds: "Look, most people get out of hand here. But I gotta keep it clean because my friends are black. Too many black people outside my place, and the cops show up. Every time."
Make no mistake: There are a lot of people at Little Earth who despise the cops utterly. (One 19-year-old woman tells me that MPD cops are "the harassers of all native people.") But most residents make at least a practical accommodation with the MPD. They agree among themselves that the problems at Little Earth are so pervasive and so intractable that a police presence is required; they also seem to concur that shoddy treatment at the hands of the MPD is a way of life, the price of the ticket for getting law enforcement when you need it. "There is a fine line between the enforcement that people demand," says Bill Means, an American Indian representative on the city's Police Community Relations Council, "and brutality that comes with that enforcement."
Still, residents call the police when there is serious trouble, even though a certain portion of the callers have outstanding warrants for their own arrest. It happened once to John Goose, 39, who has lived at Little Earth since 1999. "There's a lot of gang activity here," he notes. He called the cops one night earlier this year to report shots fired. By the time they showed up, he had gotten into a fight with his wife—who promptly won that round by telling officers her husband had never paid the fines on a 2003 DWI. Goose spent a month in the county workhouse for that offense.
"Do I regret that I called the cops?" he asks now. "No, man. I wanted the cops here. Tell the truth, I did the right thing. I protected my children and did my time. I don't have to look over my shoulder no more."
One of the more brutal memories MPD Sgt. David Burbank carries around from his days patrolling Little Earth involved the fatal cocaine overdose of a 12-year-old girl. "That's the sad reality of that place," Burbank notes. "How the heck does a 12-year-old get a hold of cocaine, let alone a lethal dose?"
Burbank, who is a Chippewa Indian, worked a beat that included Little Earth for more than two and a half years. During that time, a stint that concluded in October 2005, he was also a member of a local law enforcement consortium called the Native American Gang Task Force. By his own admission, his native status did little to get locals to open up to him. "The biggest problem is that it's always difficult to get somebody to come forward," Burbank says. "Gaining trust is the biggest obstacle."
The feeling is pretty much mutual. When he patrolled the place, Burbank remembers, "You're always looking around. You can see that [gangs] have little scouts out. You show up and there's movement all about the complex, and it's always like, 'where is he going?'"
Burbank says he agrees with residents that much of the criminal element at Little Earth stems from outside forces, not residents. Even so, he notes, gangs constantly jockey for turf at the complex: the Native Mob, Native Gangster Disciples, Native Vice Lords, Project Boyz, and MAKK MOB—which stands for Money Associated Kold-Hearted Killers, Money Over Bitches.
It's the last two, Burbank claims, that have led to a recent uptick in crimes. "It's the 15-to-17-year-old set of kids that claim to be in gangs, but they're really just about trying to act like it," Burbank says, adding that the Project Boyz in particular practice a sort of "guerrilla warfare" without much regard for consequences or codes of conduct. If anything, this spells more random violence than old-school gang activity: "In the Native Mob," he notes, "before you actually tried to do something, you had to ask a higher-up beforehand."
Burbank recalls incidents that still trouble him. One was a double homicide in November 2004 that everyone at Little Earth still talks about, the killing of two Project Boyz by members of the Native Mob. Despite the anguish it caused in the community, he recalls, there was very little cooperation from residents. The police only got one conviction out of the killing, which in turn further damaged the MPD's credibility among American Indians in the city.
Kids regularly play on their elders' historic animosity toward police, Burbank claims: "I confront the kids, and they know what's going on. They tell their grandparents, and turn it into a conflict with the police. So if we even ask anybody what's going on, it becomes that. Cops messing with them. They're just pulling the wool over their parents' eyes.
"In a way, it's a game," Burbank continues. "We're just a piece of the puzzle. There's a lack of male role models, and there's no one there to talk to them. The kids behave bad, and we have to talk to them."
Burbank transferred to another position with the MPD when his stint with the gang task force was up, even though he could have stayed on. "I try to be as professional as I can be, but you have to have your guard up the whole time," he says. "Everyone's looking at you. You can know one household, and the next day you've got to arrest four of their next-door neighbors. You try not to let that influence the relationship you have with the family you know. It does take its toll."
Burbank sees the problems at Little Earth as intractable, the kind of troubles police have no way to solve. By the time he left the assignment, "I was at the end of my rope. You feel like you're moving in circles. You clean up one part, and then something happens somewhere else."
Acting MPD Chief Tim Dolan maintains that the department only puts its best and brightest on the job at places like Little Earth. "If you're cynical about answering calls to a place like that, we're not going to put you there," Dolan says, adding that he patrolled there in the early 1980s. "There was an attraction when I was working there. The most ambitious cops wanted to work there. It was troubling, and difficult, but ultimately rewarding. They are a proud people, and if the cops were hustling, they appreciated it." And it's working, he adds, citing as evidence a trend toward fewer crimes, yet more calls to police, at the complex in recent years. (By the MPD's own accounting, however, "calls to service" have tapered off there recently, while crimes involving theft, assault, narcotics, or murder have increased. In 2002, the total number of serious crimes reported was 73; in 2005, it was 92.)
"It's not any different than some of the other areas around town," Dolan says of the place. "I'd say 99 percent of the people there are just trying to get along."
Getting along at Little Earth is often a full-time job. Lifelong resident Isaac Dennis St. Clair-Jones recalls his own experiences with crime and cops at Little Earth. When he was 12, he claims, his head was bashed into a brick wall by a cop on the northwest side of the complex. His offense? He had laughed out loud with a group of friends after the officer had slipped on some ice. "I always wanted to be a cop, too, but not after that," he says.
St. Clair-Jones got involved in a gang at Little Earth, but got out a few years ago, he says, because he has two children now. Tonight he's "smoked a couple fatties" and plans to chill at home with his family. He recalls an incident last summer when his children, who are seven and nine, were sleeping in the front room of their apartment with some of their cousins. At about 4:00 a.m., St. Clair-Jones says, a gunshot blew out the window, and glass shattered all over the kids.
"I pulled the slug out of the wall, and it looked like a .357," he says, adding that he learned later it was a gang shooting gone awry. "I wrapped the thing in a bag and took it to the police station. The cop just looked at me and threw it in the garbage."
He motions toward a gathering of teenagers nearby who are swilling from a bottle of brandy. "It was probably one of those guys," he says.
Two of them are from Little Earth originally, though they now live in Roseville. They both look to be about 17, and they come to Little Earth to party on the weekends.
"I had to get out of here," one of them explains without any hint of irony. Pretty soon he and rest of the group drift off into the recesses of the clusters of apartments, looking for a party where there's booze.
A little while later they reappear nearby, not far from where Vinnie is cradling her niece. "I have an uncle in Lincoln, Nebraska," she says wistfully, prompted by nothing in particular. Right now she's taking classes to become a nurse. "I have to get out of here, as soon as I can," she says. "These projects are no good."
source: http://citypages.com/databank/27/1338/article14559.asp
the old rift between cops and residents at south
Minneapolis's Little Earth housing complex
BY G.R. ANDERSON JR.
An evening rain has just cleared, and some of the residents of Little Earth are emerging from their apartments to enjoy the summer night. Vinnie, a 36-year-old mother of four, is out for a stroll along the grounds of the low-income housing complex, just east of Cedar Avenue South, in the 2500 block. Like most of the residents of Little Earth, Vinnie is American Indian. She's lived at the complex for about a year.
It's just after 8:00 p.m. on a Saturday, and Vinnie is feeling cheerful in spite of the previous year's troubles, incurred since she moved to town from South Dakota. She came to take care of her mother, a longtime Little Earth resident who is recovering from a kidney transplant. Just a couple of weeks back, she found herself at the business end of a knife in a confrontation with neighbors who had been harassing her mother.
And the rest of the family—well, that's why she's carrying her two- year-old niece with her as she walks. "Her mom and dad are smoking crack right now," Vinnie explains. "They smoke it right in front of her. I'm like, it's my niece. I don't want her smelling that shit."
Vinnie tells this with the assurance that her real name won't be used; retaliation for speaking out about anything is commonplace at Little Earth. The baby's parents live in the apartment next door to Vinnie's, in a row of dwellings that face south toward what used to be 25 1/2 Street, but recently was renamed E.M. Stately Street after one of the people who initiated plans for the housing complex more than 35 years ago. There's a steady stream of folks going in and out of both apartments, a flimsy storm door clattering behind them.
"Weed, cocaine, crack," Vinnie continues, ticking off the drugs of choice—aside from alcohol—found at Little Earth. "People go to the hospital and get drugs and sell them. You can get a Percocet for three dollars, and a Vicodin for four."
There's a pause. Rain clouds still linger, bringing an early darkness. Suddenly there are kids everywhere, riding dirt bikes on sidewalks and makeshift paths all around the complex. Teenagers dressed in athletic jerseys, ball caps, and blue bandanas roam about in groups, teasing, roughhousing, and flirting with each other. Many of them have been drinking; some are in local gangs. Several older adolescent girls are pushing babies in strollers.
Someone lights off some fireworks in the distance. "I hear shootings every weekend," Vinnie says, prompted by the rat-a-tat pops outside. "This will go on all night, and something will happen. Every weekend, they light off the fireworks just to fuck people up, so pretty soon you can't tell what's a real gun and what isn't."
In early June, Little Earth was briefly in the news following the public disclosure of an incident on Friday, May 26, involving the Minneapolis Police Department. That Memorial Day weekend had been unseasonably hot in the city. According to a police report, later verified by surveillance footage), cops arrived at Little Earth shortly after 7:00 that evening to break up a fight. After a long conversation with the two officers, Lt. Rick Thomas and Lt. Michael Fossum, one of the brawlers tried to flee, and was immediately handcuffed.
Over the course of the next few minutes, the suspect, identified as Juan Trinidad Vasquez, and the two officers somehow remained out of sight of the 32 security cameras scattered about the complex. When they reappeared on surveillance video, one officer was walking a handcuffed Vasquez to a squad car. The other officer approached and bumped into Vasquez, who doubled over as though he'd received a blow to the mid-section. Onlookers say Vasquez passed out. Though Vasquez was, according to the tape and the incident report, given "medical treatment," many eyewitnesses claimed that he was detained in the back of a squad on a hot day by himself—windows up, AC off—for some 30 minutes.
Both of the officers implicated in the episode were put on paid leave while the MPD and the FBI conducted investigations. They returned to their jobs June 24 in a "non-enforcement capacity" while the case remains open. Vasquez, a 24-year-old American Indian-Latino who does not live at Little Earth, was charged with a narcotics violation (the incident report notes the officers observed him "with a baggie of suspected crack cocaine").
The incident was made public 11 days later when Little Earth executive director Bill Ziegler held a press conference outside the complex's administrative offices. Ziegler was joined there by MPD interim Chief Tim Dolan, Deputy Chief Lucy Gerold, and Third Precinct Inspector Scott Gerlicher. About 100 residents, activists, and journalists showed up as well. "We have worked to make Little Earth a safe, hope-filled community," Ziegler began on a conciliatory note, praising the response of Dolan and Gerlicher. "We cannot allow this incident to destroy the relationship we've developed with the Minneapolis Police Department."
If Ziegler, who has been on the job for all of 18 months, was trying to walk a fine line, it didn't work. His apparently cozy relationship with the cops infuriated some Indian activists who have long viewed the MPD as a mortal enemy. The press, meanwhile, wanted to know why Ziegler wasn't making the tape of the incident public. "Does everyone want to see a big Indian uprising here?" he countered. "How would that help the residents? You don't live here. You'll all go home to the suburbs. You aren't stuck with the fallout from your reports."
There was also a split between the activists who were angry with the cops and those residents who sided with Ziegler's decision, and a fight nearly broke out. The next day, Clyde Bellecourt, the longtime Indian activist who had a huge hand in shaping Little Earth in its infancy, held a similarly contentious press conference. He called for the termination of Lt. Rick Thomas, and the release of the surveillance tape. Within two hours, Ziegler, citing "ongoing tension," gave out DVD copies of the tape.
But a day's delay was enough to feed the suspicion and hostility of many Little Earth residents toward the police. Though Ziegler, Dolan, and Gerlicher all say the MPD's relations with the complex have never been better, a bad history runs deep.
News accounts from the pages of the Minneapolis Star and the Minneapolis Tribune in the 1970s and '80s record a number of nameless, faceless criminal incidents ranging from assaults and murders to allegations, some subsequently confirmed, of police brutality. The past 15 years have included a number of highly publicized allegations of police wrongdoing in connection with Little Earth:
• In July 1993, a pair of MPD officers were accused of putting two Native Americans, one a Little Earth resident, in the trunk of their squad car before taking them to detox. Then-Chief John Laux drew praise for his actions, which included suspending one officer, Marvin Schumer, for 90 days without pay, and another, Michael Lardy, for 20 days without pay. The two men, Charles Lone Eagle and John Boney, were awarded $100,000 each in a subsequent civil rights suit.
• In December of that year, a 16-year-old boy at the complex was wounded by a gunshot from a cop after he waved a "realistic-looking replica" of a handgun at a cop. One officer, Anthony Diioia, was working off-duty and in uniform at Little Earth; another, David E. Campbell, was out of uniform and helping Diioia on an unrelated case. As Campbell approached a group of youths, one boy pulled out the toy gun. Both officers fired, according to news clips, wounding the boy. It was never clear which officer shot the 16-year-old. According to the StarTribune it was the "first violence at Little Earth in quite some time."
• In March 1994, two officers were accused of kidnapping a man they had stopped for a driving violation at Little Earth. According to the Star Tribune, the two cops, Richard Gonion and Malcolm Johnson, allegedly offered to let Tesfai Kashai Dirar go if he paid them $300. The officers, according to news accounts, were arrested in handcuffs at the 3rd Precinct and forced to turn in their weapons and badges. (The officers eventually pled guilty to misconduct and resigned.) City leaders decried the situation, but shirked responsibility. "I can't police from City Hall. John Laux can't supervise from City Hall," then-Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton told reporters. "These officers have failed us."
• In September 2002, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court, MPD officers broke down the door of an apartment and allegedly proceeded to kick and batter several residents in the process of throwing them to the floor and handcuffing them. One woman, Danielle Long Crow, who was eight months pregnant, was purportedly yanked from the shower and forced to lie naked and stomach-down on the floor, the complaint says. The suit, which was eventually settled for $60,000, named as one of the defendants Lt. Richard Thomas—the same Rick Thomas who was a party to the May 26 incident this year. An MPD internal investigation apparently cleared Thomas of any wrongdoing in the department's eyes; his personnel file indicates he was never disciplined for the Long Crow incident.
• In January 2003, two MPD cops were accused of urinating on an intoxicated man and then leaving him and his female companion outside in freezing temperatures at a Little Earth parking lot off Ogema Place. "We've got a good thing going and then wham, this happens," then-Chief Robert Olson said at the time. "It's just disheartening." Clyde Bellecourt roared at a subsequent press conference, "What happened in our community would never take place at Hennepin and Lake or Edina or Bloomington."
Unfortunately for the MPD, the collective memory at Little Earth is uncommonly long. "We're a tight-knit group," says one resident. "And with that comes old wounds that never heal."
Little Earth is often mistaken for an inner-city reservation, a characterization that pisses off many residents and local Indians. They call it "the compound." It is actually public housing, devised in 1971 as a low-income enclave operated by American Indians. Initially, it was just Section 8 housing funded by the federal Model City program and the Housing and Urban Development office. By 1973 it opened, with one news account quoting a building manager saying that "A strong effort has been made to keep the complex from becoming an Indian ghetto." But almost immediately the complex faced money problems. Over the years, it has survived a number of financial distresses, the prospect of imminent foreclosure, and an 11-year lawsuit with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
It is often referred to as the only urban Indian housing complex in America, and to a large degree that's true: Some 96 percent of current residents are Native American. But it's also open to anyone who qualifies for Section 8 housing and can get approved from a waiting list. It features 212 units—efficiencies, one- and two-bedroom apartments, and townhouses with as many as four or five bedrooms. The rents are based on tenants' incomes, which are usually meager. According to Little Earth's official numbers, some 800 residents live there, but even Bill Ziegler concedes that the number is more than 1,000, and some residents say it gets as high as 3,000, with relatives and friends regularly crashing there—sometimes for long periods.
As Faith Bad Moccasin, who is 66 years old and has lived there for 10 years, puts it: "It's the Indian way to take care of your family, but a week turns into two months, and pretty soon the bad elements are living next door."
What this brings is a sense that outsiders, not residents, are inflicting problems on Little Earth. But the first identified American Indian gang in contemporary Minnesota, the Naturals, started here in 1979. Since then, there have been various offshoots of what are historically considered black gangs, like the Native Gangster Disciples and the Native Vice Lords. And there is something to the notion that people come from reservations in search of work or whatever else in the city and end up squatting at Little Earth.
But there is also an element of conflict between residents of different tribal backgrounds. Over the years, as Little Earth has become predominantly Indian, it has historically been Ojibwe-dominated. In recent years, however, members of other tribes, such as Lakota Indians, have moved in, and there are divisions between the differing bands. "But natives want to live among natives," says one resident, "and that's why I live here."
In recent years, as south Minneapolis has seen an influx of Mexican immigrants, the face of Little Earth has changed slightly as Indian and Latino cultures gravitated toward each other. "They're both indigenous peoples," notes Vince Hill, an Ojibwe reporter for the Native American Press/Ojibwe News, "but now you see native tongues dying out"—in some cases replaced by Spanish, or the collective tongue of poor America, hip-hop vernacular.
Geographically, "the compound" comprises a couple of parcels of land in a neighborhood now known as East Phillips, bordered by 24th and 26th streets on the south and north ends, and 18th and Hiawatha Avenues on the west and east. A pedestrian bridge, the main visual element of Little Earth, arches over Cedar Avenue. There are six or seven clusters of sloping, stucco buildings in the west side of the complex. It's not hard to imagine Little Earth as decent public housing, at least cosmetically, back in the day. There are patios, and gates, and patches of yard in some of the clusters. There's a bucolic park on the west side of Cedar Avenue—which runs right through the heart of Little Earth—that appears to epitomize what urban green space can do for a community, complete with playground equipment, public grills, and towering trees. The units on the west side were rehabbed and fitted with central air conditioning units not long ago.
They don't have central air on the east side of Cedar. But they do have a security center, as well as a majority of the compound's 32 surveillance cameras. The dwellings on Ogema Place (the name is Ojibwe for "king" or "leader") have a pervasive air of poverty. They face east toward a high retaining wall that's part of Hiawatha Avenue. On the ground, there are wrecked cars, broken screens, fast-food litter, and an occasional lampshade or abandoned Styrofoam cooler. Judging from the forensic evidence scattered everywhere, the canned beverages of choice include Diet Coke, Bud Ice, and Colt 45.
East side or west, the one unifying theme at Little Earth, besides native heritage, is poverty. Some 80 percent of households are led by single mothers, according to estimates of those who live and work there. "Of the families and individuals currently occupying the units," according to a current Little Earth press release, "99 percent are very low income and 1 percent are low income." Further, "69 percent of the households have annual incomes less than $10,000."
As of 2000, the official population of Census Tract 73.01, which encompasses Little Earth, was 1,733 people in 485 households. Of the roughly 400 renter households, 225 had no car, 206 were below the federal poverty line, 95 were on public assistance, and 49 had no phone service. Demographically, some 1,500 residents were American Indian or mixed-race. More than 58 percent were under the age of 18, and just 11 percent older than 45. Married couples made up only 18 percent of the population, single mothers 45 percent. And of the 950 residents over the age of 16, 9 percent were unemployed and another 41 percent were "not in the labor force"—making for an effective unemployment rate of 50 percent. About 96 percent of the households made less than $25,000 a year.
Going back a decade, MPD maps of violent crime in the area for 1996 and 1997 show a steady wave of aggravated assault, rape, domestic assault, and a handful of homicides. In 1998, some 2,373 serious crimes—such as aggravated assault, rape, or murder—occurred in the Phillips neighborhood, which was a huge part of town before it was split into four separate neighborhoods. A good quarter of those crimes, by MPD estimates, happened near or at Little Earth. (That figure for all of Phillips nearly doubles the total in impoverished north side areas like Jordan and Hawthorne during the same period.)
In 2001, the MPD started keeping statistics for Phillips East, which is a more precise sample, an eight-block area that consists mostly of Little Earth. There were 320 reported crimes in the area that year alone. And nearly every resident recalls a period of slightly longer than six months, from November 2004 to June 2005, when there were five homicides on the Little Earth grounds. Little Earth used to have private security patrol the complex, but for nearly a decade now, off-duty MPD cops have been hired to do so.
"I made 20 calls a night," says Martha Fast Horse of her days working as a dispatcher at Little Earth. (Residents at the complex are hired to monitor security cameras and call police when necessary.) "And you have to make them, even though you know you'll be a target. Otherwise you get the feeling that this stuff will never end."
Rick Thomas, a 25-year MPD veteran, has patrolled Little Earth for several years. Nearly everyone at Little Earth knows him, and he surely knows the place better than most outsiders. He's been there to apply the community-policing touch, too—working with youth programs and sitting in on regular meetings with a Little Earth crime committee.
Thomas, like the MPD itself, inspires vehement if surprisingly varied reactions from the people who live there. Take the 2002 Long Crow episode: Not everybody at Little Earth was outraged by the raid. "I went without sleep for two years living next door to them," attests 30-year resident Lori Ellis of the Long Crows. "Those were types of problems that Rick was good at dealing with.
"I think he just had too much on his plate," she says of Thomas's alleged misconduct. "He's been very effective in dealing with crack houses here, and he's often here overnight. I can understand why something would go wrong." She stops short of a hearty endorsement, though. In general, Ellis says, "I am in-between on Thomas and the cops. I don't have nothing bad to say about them. But I wouldn't use the word 'love' either. I don't know that we're that close."
(Thomas declined to comment to City Pages about the May 26 Vazquez incident, citing MPD policy that forbids officers to discuss ongoing investigations.)
Thomas "has done a lot for the community," wrote Martha Fast Horse in a recent letter to MPD acting Chief Tim Dolan. She went on to recount a 2004 incident involving a group of kids who had beaten up her 15-year-old son. Afterward, "I went over to their unit and nearly knocked the door down pounding on it," Fast Horse wrote. "I am not ashamed to admit that I am a mother bear when it comes to my children, and I was ready to do battle with the whole group. They called the police on me. Rick showed up to save their lives. So, nobody can tell me that he doesn't care about all people equally, even the gang members.
"From where I stood, I could see him coming from the 2501 building where the police substation is housed," Fast Horse continues. "He looked tired like he had been up working all night; I later found out that was in fact the truth. He walked up to me and said, 'Doesn't this ever end?'"
At the same time, numerous younger residents can recall unpleasant run-ins with Thomas. Some of them call him "Mr. Bigguns" in sneering testament to his swagger. "What he does, it creates a lot of tension," says 27-year-old Isaac Dennis St. Clair-Jones, a lifelong resident of Little Earth.
Joho Ellis, who's part of a very distinct minority as an African American living at Little Earth—he lives with his Ojibwe girlfriend—says he's seen Thomas around plenty. "I know him," he chortles. He declines to say more about Thomas specifically, then adds: "Look, most people get out of hand here. But I gotta keep it clean because my friends are black. Too many black people outside my place, and the cops show up. Every time."
Make no mistake: There are a lot of people at Little Earth who despise the cops utterly. (One 19-year-old woman tells me that MPD cops are "the harassers of all native people.") But most residents make at least a practical accommodation with the MPD. They agree among themselves that the problems at Little Earth are so pervasive and so intractable that a police presence is required; they also seem to concur that shoddy treatment at the hands of the MPD is a way of life, the price of the ticket for getting law enforcement when you need it. "There is a fine line between the enforcement that people demand," says Bill Means, an American Indian representative on the city's Police Community Relations Council, "and brutality that comes with that enforcement."
Still, residents call the police when there is serious trouble, even though a certain portion of the callers have outstanding warrants for their own arrest. It happened once to John Goose, 39, who has lived at Little Earth since 1999. "There's a lot of gang activity here," he notes. He called the cops one night earlier this year to report shots fired. By the time they showed up, he had gotten into a fight with his wife—who promptly won that round by telling officers her husband had never paid the fines on a 2003 DWI. Goose spent a month in the county workhouse for that offense.
"Do I regret that I called the cops?" he asks now. "No, man. I wanted the cops here. Tell the truth, I did the right thing. I protected my children and did my time. I don't have to look over my shoulder no more."
One of the more brutal memories MPD Sgt. David Burbank carries around from his days patrolling Little Earth involved the fatal cocaine overdose of a 12-year-old girl. "That's the sad reality of that place," Burbank notes. "How the heck does a 12-year-old get a hold of cocaine, let alone a lethal dose?"
Burbank, who is a Chippewa Indian, worked a beat that included Little Earth for more than two and a half years. During that time, a stint that concluded in October 2005, he was also a member of a local law enforcement consortium called the Native American Gang Task Force. By his own admission, his native status did little to get locals to open up to him. "The biggest problem is that it's always difficult to get somebody to come forward," Burbank says. "Gaining trust is the biggest obstacle."
The feeling is pretty much mutual. When he patrolled the place, Burbank remembers, "You're always looking around. You can see that [gangs] have little scouts out. You show up and there's movement all about the complex, and it's always like, 'where is he going?'"
Burbank says he agrees with residents that much of the criminal element at Little Earth stems from outside forces, not residents. Even so, he notes, gangs constantly jockey for turf at the complex: the Native Mob, Native Gangster Disciples, Native Vice Lords, Project Boyz, and MAKK MOB—which stands for Money Associated Kold-Hearted Killers, Money Over Bitches.
It's the last two, Burbank claims, that have led to a recent uptick in crimes. "It's the 15-to-17-year-old set of kids that claim to be in gangs, but they're really just about trying to act like it," Burbank says, adding that the Project Boyz in particular practice a sort of "guerrilla warfare" without much regard for consequences or codes of conduct. If anything, this spells more random violence than old-school gang activity: "In the Native Mob," he notes, "before you actually tried to do something, you had to ask a higher-up beforehand."
Burbank recalls incidents that still trouble him. One was a double homicide in November 2004 that everyone at Little Earth still talks about, the killing of two Project Boyz by members of the Native Mob. Despite the anguish it caused in the community, he recalls, there was very little cooperation from residents. The police only got one conviction out of the killing, which in turn further damaged the MPD's credibility among American Indians in the city.
Kids regularly play on their elders' historic animosity toward police, Burbank claims: "I confront the kids, and they know what's going on. They tell their grandparents, and turn it into a conflict with the police. So if we even ask anybody what's going on, it becomes that. Cops messing with them. They're just pulling the wool over their parents' eyes.
"In a way, it's a game," Burbank continues. "We're just a piece of the puzzle. There's a lack of male role models, and there's no one there to talk to them. The kids behave bad, and we have to talk to them."
Burbank transferred to another position with the MPD when his stint with the gang task force was up, even though he could have stayed on. "I try to be as professional as I can be, but you have to have your guard up the whole time," he says. "Everyone's looking at you. You can know one household, and the next day you've got to arrest four of their next-door neighbors. You try not to let that influence the relationship you have with the family you know. It does take its toll."
Burbank sees the problems at Little Earth as intractable, the kind of troubles police have no way to solve. By the time he left the assignment, "I was at the end of my rope. You feel like you're moving in circles. You clean up one part, and then something happens somewhere else."
Acting MPD Chief Tim Dolan maintains that the department only puts its best and brightest on the job at places like Little Earth. "If you're cynical about answering calls to a place like that, we're not going to put you there," Dolan says, adding that he patrolled there in the early 1980s. "There was an attraction when I was working there. The most ambitious cops wanted to work there. It was troubling, and difficult, but ultimately rewarding. They are a proud people, and if the cops were hustling, they appreciated it." And it's working, he adds, citing as evidence a trend toward fewer crimes, yet more calls to police, at the complex in recent years. (By the MPD's own accounting, however, "calls to service" have tapered off there recently, while crimes involving theft, assault, narcotics, or murder have increased. In 2002, the total number of serious crimes reported was 73; in 2005, it was 92.)
"It's not any different than some of the other areas around town," Dolan says of the place. "I'd say 99 percent of the people there are just trying to get along."
Getting along at Little Earth is often a full-time job. Lifelong resident Isaac Dennis St. Clair-Jones recalls his own experiences with crime and cops at Little Earth. When he was 12, he claims, his head was bashed into a brick wall by a cop on the northwest side of the complex. His offense? He had laughed out loud with a group of friends after the officer had slipped on some ice. "I always wanted to be a cop, too, but not after that," he says.
St. Clair-Jones got involved in a gang at Little Earth, but got out a few years ago, he says, because he has two children now. Tonight he's "smoked a couple fatties" and plans to chill at home with his family. He recalls an incident last summer when his children, who are seven and nine, were sleeping in the front room of their apartment with some of their cousins. At about 4:00 a.m., St. Clair-Jones says, a gunshot blew out the window, and glass shattered all over the kids.
"I pulled the slug out of the wall, and it looked like a .357," he says, adding that he learned later it was a gang shooting gone awry. "I wrapped the thing in a bag and took it to the police station. The cop just looked at me and threw it in the garbage."
He motions toward a gathering of teenagers nearby who are swilling from a bottle of brandy. "It was probably one of those guys," he says.
Two of them are from Little Earth originally, though they now live in Roseville. They both look to be about 17, and they come to Little Earth to party on the weekends.
"I had to get out of here," one of them explains without any hint of irony. Pretty soon he and rest of the group drift off into the recesses of the clusters of apartments, looking for a party where there's booze.
A little while later they reappear nearby, not far from where Vinnie is cradling her niece. "I have an uncle in Lincoln, Nebraska," she says wistfully, prompted by nothing in particular. Right now she's taking classes to become a nurse. "I have to get out of here, as soon as I can," she says. "These projects are no good."
source: http://citypages.com/databank/27/1338/article14559.asp
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Fiskars Grant e-mail discussion
Brad, how did you happen to intercept the deliver of the tools sent by the Fiskars Corporation? I know they had my address correct, since it is in the letter Peace with Justice Gardeners sent them, and since they did make some of their first deliveries to my house.
Thanks,
Llen
Love Life, Earth, Neighbor
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lynne-
The tools from Fiskar arrived on a day when you
apparently weren’t available. I understand the
delivery men knocked on your door. They tried to find
you and when unable, called Paul Wichmann whose name
was on the garden shed as the contact person. Paul was
out of town and they reached him on his cell phone. I
think he may have tried to contact Andy, who was also
unable to help with the delivery. He then called me
and said the men wanted to get going and would I
please help with this delivery. I interrupted my day
and went over to the garden, unloaded 16 bundles of
tools, in the hot sun I might add, and put them in the
shed. Neither Paul nor I knew anything nor had been
told anything about the Fiskars Grant at this time,
though we are both on the Garden Steering Committee.
We only knew someone was trying to deliver tools,
which the guy claimed belonged at the garden address,
however, they did not have the name of the garden,
East Phillips Community 17th Ave. garden right either.
There was nothing mentioning East Phillips Community
at all, though that was on the garden shed and this
confused them. The garden was only called Organic 17th
Ave, sort of generic and could be anywhere. Our
actions, contrary to your suggestive remarks, were
entirely innocent.
Our simply helping out some delivery truck guys is not
worth your getting “depressed, sad, and angry about
[our] recent actions”. Or your getting “a stomach ache
or crying”. (quotes from your emails). Nor should this
cause you to create elaborate conspiracy theories
about some of us and send them all over town, creating
the impression that some great evil is going on here.
Why didn’t you just ask these questions weeks ago
instead of stewing about this?
Most of us do not have time for “listening groups” of
people who have no involvement here and do not know
anything about the history of the garden and the
effort of many to create open and democratic rules,
which the steering committee has followed without
fail. Unless these people were committed to real
democracy and not just your personal friends, as
appears to be the primary target of your email list,
there would be no point anyway. Many of these people
have never come to the people (me and others) whom you
spread stories about, to hear our point of view. Why,
then, should we value their integrity? Point is: the
gardeners have done nothing that you have not been a
witness to or signed on to yourself.
Also no one would ever think of “yelling at” the
proprietor of Mother Earth Garden Store. I have no
idea what you are talking about and why you would ever
suggest that. I think those of us who know you have
suggested this to a large number of people have a
right to be both amazed and angry that you would imply
that is what is going on here.
Lynne, no one else is emailing people all over town
and there is no one spreading rumors, except you. You
need to stop spreading these suggestive
misrepresentations and innuendoes about others. All
the garden meetings have been democratic and open to
view. Nothing has been done by the steering committee
that has not been done openly. While you have not been
willing to include the rest of the gardeners who are
not your renters in the writing of this grant and have
refused to offer copies to the steering committee, we
have been entirely open with you. You have come to all
our meetings. We were not notified nor invited to any
of your meetings over the winter, when this grant was
written, committing the gardeners to things without
our knowledge.
If there is a problem here, it would seem to be your
extreme distrust of your neighbors and fellow
gardeners. All I did was unload a truck at Paul’s
request. He is, after all, the chair of the steering
committee. If this was a problem for you, you could
have just asked a few weeks ago instead of going into
orbit over this and involving all sorts of people in a
series of veiled accusations against your fellow
gardeners.
I think much would be helped if you could just
honestly inquire and share information and stop
attributing the worst to some of your neighbors. Next
time I’ll tell the trucks to go away. I want no
apologies or lengthy commentaries on community and
democracy in response to these remarks. I am into
doing democracy and community, not just talking about
them.
Brad
PS: Lynne, you write in one of these letters: "I am
happy to answer any questions you have about this
letter." Yet the Garden Steering Committee has
repeatedly asked for a copy of the grant, once we
realized its existence. We also do not know who the
Peace and Justice Gardeners are. We need to know these
things and have asked them repeatedly, but you have
refused to answer them. Yet in this letter from some
time ago you claim to be willing to do so and seem to
be accusing others of hiding things. What things these
are I have no idea, but you need to honor your remark
that you will answer questions.
The Peace and Justice group does not have jurisdiction
over the garden and must come through the recognized
garden group, those who signed the garden use
agreement (you also signed this agreement) and their
elected steering committee. If there is a grant
connected with the garden and having any requirements
of the gardeners or relationship to the garden, the
least you should do is inform them (us), but it is not
appropriate or even legal that the gardeners have had
no involvement in the creation of this grant and its
implementation, whatever its obligations are. But the
least we can do is know what they are and try to meet
them. You appear to have committed us to things
without our knowledge, though we don't even know. And
since we know nothing about this, we can't even say a
relevant thank you. You need to live up to your words
and your signing of the garden use agreement, namely
commitments to openness, notification, democratic
process and accountability. No amount of
"mediation/conflict resolution" can take the place of
living up to one’s agreements.
Brad
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 22, 2006
Dear Brad Pass (and 2006 Gardeners and supporters),
I glanced over, but have not yet found time to read your email, Brad.
In the meantime, you may want to know:
When I was doing magazine recycling at home (1), I found one pair of Fiskars hand pruners in my recycling basket. As you know, I had been upset because some of the tools were lost and broken, and felt you were, to some extent, responsible for not following through with a means for checking tools in and out from the shed. Afraid I may not be making myself clear, I will spell this out further. This means that I was upset with lost tools AND that I, myself, was responsible for at least one of those lost tools.
I did also find my looseleaf notebook. It was in one of my portable file cabinets, not the blue basket I had taken to the meeting. (I had implied that you might have taken it from the garden.)
Inside of the looseleaf I found:
* The lists of Fiskar¹s grant award "packages". With these lists, Paul W. and I updated the inventory. (There is only one lost tool at this point; a little hand trowel with numbers marking inches etched into the metal.) I gave Paul a copy of the inventory, and will put one copy in the blue notebook in the shed.
* The garden application and $20 bill from a gardener.
In addition, in one of my emails I indicated that the Fiskars grant is worth $3100. Actually, looking at the Fiskar¹s tool price list, it is more like $2100
Well, so there all that is.
My apologies. Especially for voicing suspicions and implied accusations that were, to large extent, my own fault. Sort of the worse kind of thing a person can do, actually. May as well be honest about that. To lose stuff and then publicly imply someone else took it as further justification for distrusting that person is pretty danged destructive. Not as bad as murder. But bad. I think all the great spiritual teachers say to falsely accuse one¹s neighbor is a kind of murder, since it can kill off reputations and community cohesion. I know I am getting preachy here. So I will leave it at that.
I hope a person gets to apologize several times in the same week, since I need to do just that. I dread to think that I¹ll have to make more apologies in the future, but it wouldn¹t surprise me.
Regarding your upset about my spreading ³conspiracy theories² ³all over town²: the people who are getting these letters are: some of the 17th Ave. gardeners (those whose emails I have), EPIC community elders (Wenji and Vanhalla), and funders with some civic responsibility for the gardens (Corrie Zoll from Green Institute, and Robert Thompson from Neighborhood Revitalization).
In any case, I think you have won two rounds of emails. So the score is 2-0 in your favor. Well, unless we score according to another system. Such as for each point won within an email. In which case the score, unfortunately for me, is more like 5-0 your favor.
I hope "all over town" doesn't find out how poorly I am faring in the debate so far. Please don't spread it beyond town into the neighboring states and countries. I would really rather only a limited number of people find out. Until my score improves significantly.
I will read and respond to your letter as soon as time allows. I am committed to working through these misunderstandings.
Also, I plan to pull ahead on the scoreboard.
Sincerely,
Llen
-------------------------------------------------------------
25 June 06
Dear Paul:
Gardeners:
Rebekah Teague: 721-2753
Sheryle Batcher: 724-4089
Brandy Kyllonen: 597-3559
Mark: 651-341-2278
Danny & Caroline: I don't have a number. They live across from the garden
Other residents have expressed interest in "cooperative plot" wherein we all
work together and share the food.
May all gardeners have access to the contact numbers for all gardeners?
This would facilitate communication and democracy.
Fiskars Grant:
Paul, I think it needs to be clear that the 17th Ave. Gardeners Steering
Committee did not write, and are not responsible for the grant. Regarding
your request for more information, may I suggest a conversation with the
Peace with Justice Gardeners to answer questions and fulfill obligations.
We have the grant proposal. I would like ground rules for implementation as
well as contacts with Fiskars. I am available for a meeting with you and
anyone else regarding the grant at a time convenient to you. The people who
helped with the grant should be there. Megan, Andy, & Matt B., if possible.
Mondays and Tuesdays are best, I believe. (megan & andy are out of town the
rest of the week)
Sincerely,
Llen
-------------------------------------------------------------
My note:
Lynne and the 17th Avenue Gardeners DID have a meeting. Lynne was voted to be excluded from any leadership at the garden for no less than TWO YEARS, because she applied for a grant without EPC/17th Avenue Gardeners permission. Lynne contends there was no Steering Committee in existence when she applied for the grant. EPC believes that the previous years steering committee would still be in charge until the next election.
Lynne is working to mediate with the garden group. Regardless of other goals within Peace and Justic Organic Gardeners, this seems to be of primary concern. If Lynne has no authority in the garden, she may lose significant garden space and a say in whether it remains Organic. ( or any say at all for that matter )
I feel she will work to create her own garden plots on available land resources she has available. Therefore, I predict a plot will be established next to her 2408 17th Avenue duplex. ( as I live in 2406)
Thanks,
Llen
Love Life, Earth, Neighbor
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lynne-
The tools from Fiskar arrived on a day when you
apparently weren’t available. I understand the
delivery men knocked on your door. They tried to find
you and when unable, called Paul Wichmann whose name
was on the garden shed as the contact person. Paul was
out of town and they reached him on his cell phone. I
think he may have tried to contact Andy, who was also
unable to help with the delivery. He then called me
and said the men wanted to get going and would I
please help with this delivery. I interrupted my day
and went over to the garden, unloaded 16 bundles of
tools, in the hot sun I might add, and put them in the
shed. Neither Paul nor I knew anything nor had been
told anything about the Fiskars Grant at this time,
though we are both on the Garden Steering Committee.
We only knew someone was trying to deliver tools,
which the guy claimed belonged at the garden address,
however, they did not have the name of the garden,
East Phillips Community 17th Ave. garden right either.
There was nothing mentioning East Phillips Community
at all, though that was on the garden shed and this
confused them. The garden was only called Organic 17th
Ave, sort of generic and could be anywhere. Our
actions, contrary to your suggestive remarks, were
entirely innocent.
Our simply helping out some delivery truck guys is not
worth your getting “depressed, sad, and angry about
[our] recent actions”. Or your getting “a stomach ache
or crying”. (quotes from your emails). Nor should this
cause you to create elaborate conspiracy theories
about some of us and send them all over town, creating
the impression that some great evil is going on here.
Why didn’t you just ask these questions weeks ago
instead of stewing about this?
Most of us do not have time for “listening groups” of
people who have no involvement here and do not know
anything about the history of the garden and the
effort of many to create open and democratic rules,
which the steering committee has followed without
fail. Unless these people were committed to real
democracy and not just your personal friends, as
appears to be the primary target of your email list,
there would be no point anyway. Many of these people
have never come to the people (me and others) whom you
spread stories about, to hear our point of view. Why,
then, should we value their integrity? Point is: the
gardeners have done nothing that you have not been a
witness to or signed on to yourself.
Also no one would ever think of “yelling at” the
proprietor of Mother Earth Garden Store. I have no
idea what you are talking about and why you would ever
suggest that. I think those of us who know you have
suggested this to a large number of people have a
right to be both amazed and angry that you would imply
that is what is going on here.
Lynne, no one else is emailing people all over town
and there is no one spreading rumors, except you. You
need to stop spreading these suggestive
misrepresentations and innuendoes about others. All
the garden meetings have been democratic and open to
view. Nothing has been done by the steering committee
that has not been done openly. While you have not been
willing to include the rest of the gardeners who are
not your renters in the writing of this grant and have
refused to offer copies to the steering committee, we
have been entirely open with you. You have come to all
our meetings. We were not notified nor invited to any
of your meetings over the winter, when this grant was
written, committing the gardeners to things without
our knowledge.
If there is a problem here, it would seem to be your
extreme distrust of your neighbors and fellow
gardeners. All I did was unload a truck at Paul’s
request. He is, after all, the chair of the steering
committee. If this was a problem for you, you could
have just asked a few weeks ago instead of going into
orbit over this and involving all sorts of people in a
series of veiled accusations against your fellow
gardeners.
I think much would be helped if you could just
honestly inquire and share information and stop
attributing the worst to some of your neighbors. Next
time I’ll tell the trucks to go away. I want no
apologies or lengthy commentaries on community and
democracy in response to these remarks. I am into
doing democracy and community, not just talking about
them.
Brad
PS: Lynne, you write in one of these letters: "I am
happy to answer any questions you have about this
letter." Yet the Garden Steering Committee has
repeatedly asked for a copy of the grant, once we
realized its existence. We also do not know who the
Peace and Justice Gardeners are. We need to know these
things and have asked them repeatedly, but you have
refused to answer them. Yet in this letter from some
time ago you claim to be willing to do so and seem to
be accusing others of hiding things. What things these
are I have no idea, but you need to honor your remark
that you will answer questions.
The Peace and Justice group does not have jurisdiction
over the garden and must come through the recognized
garden group, those who signed the garden use
agreement (you also signed this agreement) and their
elected steering committee. If there is a grant
connected with the garden and having any requirements
of the gardeners or relationship to the garden, the
least you should do is inform them (us), but it is not
appropriate or even legal that the gardeners have had
no involvement in the creation of this grant and its
implementation, whatever its obligations are. But the
least we can do is know what they are and try to meet
them. You appear to have committed us to things
without our knowledge, though we don't even know. And
since we know nothing about this, we can't even say a
relevant thank you. You need to live up to your words
and your signing of the garden use agreement, namely
commitments to openness, notification, democratic
process and accountability. No amount of
"mediation/conflict resolution" can take the place of
living up to one’s agreements.
Brad
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 22, 2006
Dear Brad Pass (and 2006 Gardeners and supporters),
I glanced over, but have not yet found time to read your email, Brad.
In the meantime, you may want to know:
When I was doing magazine recycling at home (1), I found one pair of Fiskars hand pruners in my recycling basket. As you know, I had been upset because some of the tools were lost and broken, and felt you were, to some extent, responsible for not following through with a means for checking tools in and out from the shed. Afraid I may not be making myself clear, I will spell this out further. This means that I was upset with lost tools AND that I, myself, was responsible for at least one of those lost tools.
I did also find my looseleaf notebook. It was in one of my portable file cabinets, not the blue basket I had taken to the meeting. (I had implied that you might have taken it from the garden.)
Inside of the looseleaf I found:
* The lists of Fiskar¹s grant award "packages". With these lists, Paul W. and I updated the inventory. (There is only one lost tool at this point; a little hand trowel with numbers marking inches etched into the metal.) I gave Paul a copy of the inventory, and will put one copy in the blue notebook in the shed.
* The garden application and $20 bill from a gardener.
In addition, in one of my emails I indicated that the Fiskars grant is worth $3100. Actually, looking at the Fiskar¹s tool price list, it is more like $2100
Well, so there all that is.
My apologies. Especially for voicing suspicions and implied accusations that were, to large extent, my own fault. Sort of the worse kind of thing a person can do, actually. May as well be honest about that. To lose stuff and then publicly imply someone else took it as further justification for distrusting that person is pretty danged destructive. Not as bad as murder. But bad. I think all the great spiritual teachers say to falsely accuse one¹s neighbor is a kind of murder, since it can kill off reputations and community cohesion. I know I am getting preachy here. So I will leave it at that.
I hope a person gets to apologize several times in the same week, since I need to do just that. I dread to think that I¹ll have to make more apologies in the future, but it wouldn¹t surprise me.
Regarding your upset about my spreading ³conspiracy theories² ³all over town²: the people who are getting these letters are: some of the 17th Ave. gardeners (those whose emails I have), EPIC community elders (Wenji and Vanhalla), and funders with some civic responsibility for the gardens (Corrie Zoll from Green Institute, and Robert Thompson from Neighborhood Revitalization).
In any case, I think you have won two rounds of emails. So the score is 2-0 in your favor. Well, unless we score according to another system. Such as for each point won within an email. In which case the score, unfortunately for me, is more like 5-0 your favor.
I hope "all over town" doesn't find out how poorly I am faring in the debate so far. Please don't spread it beyond town into the neighboring states and countries. I would really rather only a limited number of people find out. Until my score improves significantly.
I will read and respond to your letter as soon as time allows. I am committed to working through these misunderstandings.
Also, I plan to pull ahead on the scoreboard.
Sincerely,
Llen
-------------------------------------------------------------
25 June 06
Dear Paul:
Gardeners:
Rebekah Teague: 721-2753
Sheryle Batcher: 724-4089
Brandy Kyllonen: 597-3559
Mark: 651-341-2278
Danny & Caroline: I don't have a number. They live across from the garden
Other residents have expressed interest in "cooperative plot" wherein we all
work together and share the food.
May all gardeners have access to the contact numbers for all gardeners?
This would facilitate communication and democracy.
Fiskars Grant:
Paul, I think it needs to be clear that the 17th Ave. Gardeners Steering
Committee did not write, and are not responsible for the grant. Regarding
your request for more information, may I suggest a conversation with the
Peace with Justice Gardeners to answer questions and fulfill obligations.
We have the grant proposal. I would like ground rules for implementation as
well as contacts with Fiskars. I am available for a meeting with you and
anyone else regarding the grant at a time convenient to you. The people who
helped with the grant should be there. Megan, Andy, & Matt B., if possible.
Mondays and Tuesdays are best, I believe. (megan & andy are out of town the
rest of the week)
Sincerely,
Llen
-------------------------------------------------------------
My note:
Lynne and the 17th Avenue Gardeners DID have a meeting. Lynne was voted to be excluded from any leadership at the garden for no less than TWO YEARS, because she applied for a grant without EPC/17th Avenue Gardeners permission. Lynne contends there was no Steering Committee in existence when she applied for the grant. EPC believes that the previous years steering committee would still be in charge until the next election.
Lynne is working to mediate with the garden group. Regardless of other goals within Peace and Justic Organic Gardeners, this seems to be of primary concern. If Lynne has no authority in the garden, she may lose significant garden space and a say in whether it remains Organic. ( or any say at all for that matter )
I feel she will work to create her own garden plots on available land resources she has available. Therefore, I predict a plot will be established next to her 2408 17th Avenue duplex. ( as I live in 2406)
Monday, May 01, 2006
Bacteria Turn Styrofoam into Biodegradable Plastic
Kevin O'Connor and his European colleagues turned the polystyrene into an oil through pyrolysis--a process that heats the petroleum-based plastic to 520 degrees Celsius in the absence of oxygen. This results in a chemical cocktail made up of more than 80 percent styrene oil plus low volumes of other toxicants. The researchers then fed this brew to P. putida CA-3, a special strain of a common soil microbe, fully expecting that the oil would have to be further purified in order to enable bacterial growth.
By David Biello
source: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0007B0AE-88AF-13FF-88AF83414B7F0000
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Project Energy: Our Oil Addiction
(WCCO) When humans first harnessed energy, it was fire, and the fuel was wood.
Industry began to develop when man found coal. And the society we know today developed when we found oil.
Economical, accessible and seemingly endless – oil. But, it is not endless, and it now appears the unthinkable is happening. We are beginning to run out of conventional oil.
The United States was once the largest exporter of oil to the rest of the world. It is now the world's largest importer.
The world is now using more oil, globally, than we are finding.
"Exxon is saying the last year when we found more oil than we burned was 1987. So, the handwriting is on the wall that we are not finding it," said Kenneth Deffeyes. He is the emeritus professor of geosciences at Princeton, a former Shell oil geologist, and author of two books in a growing list on the subject of peak oil.
Oil production follows a curve. In more than 150 years, it has grown to where petroleum geologists say is the halfway point – the peak.
But we demand oil in greater quantities than we can produce. And demand will continue rising with an aggressively growing population, and the burgeoning industries of China and India. When demand for oil increases as supplies decrease, the serious trouble begins.
"I come out with the strong conclusion that the oil fields we have already found contain 94 percent of all the oil we are ever going to find," Deffeyes said.
According to a report commissioned by the Department of Energy, the peaking of conventional oil "… will cause protracted economic hardships in the United States and the world. It is a problem unlike any yet faced by a modern industrial society."
Remarkably, the oil companies themselves are warning us:
"Some say that by 2020 we'll have used half the world's oil. Some say we already have ... ," according to a recent Chevron ad.
One oil company, British Petroleum, has even moved to change its name. BP now means, Beyond Petroleum.
"We might have already passed peak oil," said Matthew Simmons. Simmons is the president of the world's largest energy banking firm.
He says the growing demand in the face of diminishing supplies is really the problem.
"We have a world that's headed towards a need of about 120 million barrels a day in 2020," said Simmons, "And by 2020, if we're on top of peak oil today, our oil supply could easily be only 60-65-70 million barrels a day."
And Simmons says because of depletion, in the next five years, a barrel of oil will cost $180 — three times what it is now.
At that rate, it would cost $150 to $200 to fill your tank.
"It would be extremely difficult," said Betty Albitz.
We sat down with a group of Minnesotans — Betty Albitz, Chad Amon, Stefanie Igtanloc and Al Alexander — to get their thoughts on what happens in a world of less and more expensive oil.
"Tell me how your life changes, Betty, when gas costs $10 a gallon," asked WCCO-TV anchor Don Shelby.
"Probably car pool, try to get more people in a car, that sort of thing," said Albitz. "You just try being more efficient with the energy you're going to burn."
"Maybe walk or bike when I can," said Amon.
"I think we reduce the uses of the vehicles. You take my case, I have an SUV, my wife does not. We'd probably find a way to use my car less," said Alexander.
"But it upsets our reality," Alexander continued, "Our reality is, until you go to the pump and there's no gas, you won't get it."
But it's more than just our cars according to Senator Norm Coleman.
"You're going to lose your job," Coleman said. "You're going to lose your ability to pay for heating when it's very cold in Minnesota. We're talking about catastrophic, we're talking about, and I'm not a 'the sky is falling' kind of guy, but we're talking about cataclysmic impacts upon the American economy."
In the halls of the U.S. Congress, the questions of diminishing supplies, alternative fuels, and sustainability have been carried traditionally by Democrats. But increasingly Republicans — often associated with big oil — are warning the party's over.
"Like kids that found the cookie jar, we just pigged out," said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland. He is the capitol's leading voice on Peak Oil and Energy policy. He is a conservative Republican.
"Future generations are going to look back and ask themselves, how could they have done that?" said Bartlett. "This enormous wealth that they found under the ground and they just pigged it up as quickly as possible with not thought for tomorrow."
Regardless of politics, there's a growing consensus that the right thing to do is prepare for the end of oil.
Even the President of the United States has now begun to talk about the scarcity of oil, its effect on foreign policy and the security of the country.
"Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy," said President George W. Bush in his State of the Union Address. "And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world."
We have heard messages like this before from the White House.
"Had we listened to Jimmy Carter, 20 years ago, and taken his advice and started working on conservation, working on alternatives, we'd be in great shape right now. We didn't listen," Deffeyes said.
So, we went to Atlanta to listen.
"My hope is that every person who lives in Minnesota will take on himself or herself a direct responsibility," said former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
"The American people have been enticed, through false propaganda and accepting extremely inefficient vehicles to propel them from one place to another," Carter said. "And it's up to the government, first of all, which has defaulted in my opinion on that responsibility, and the second responsibility is for the people of Minnesota to say, I'll do it myself, and be proud of it."
"Well it becomes overwhelming in terms of, what can one person do," Amon said.
"I hope I as myself will try to make more decisions," said Igtanloc, "but I think to get the people en masse, it's going to take the government."
"But it all comes back to money," said Alexander, "I mean, you know what I mean, that's not a moral decision, that's an economic decision. What does that say about us as a country?"
"But I think this country," said Albitz, "it is the free enterprise system. The masses will rise given the education, given the opportunities, given the creativity of the human mind for alternatives. I'm still remaining optimistic."
(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.) source: http://wcco.com/topstories/Project.Energy.energy.2.372413.html
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Unions versus right to work stats
It appears that when unions have the right to organize, they are more effective in increasing wages and benefits. Go figure? Right to work laws appear very weak an ineffective, unless you are a corporatist.
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Mind the Gap: Disparities and Competitiveness in the Twin Cities
Minneapolis-St. Paul is relatively strong compared to other metropolitan areas nationally. It has one of the most highly educated populations in the country. Its median household income is the twelfth highest among the 100 largest metros. And the region's job growth has outpaced the nation's for several decades. Additionally, the region has a long history of regional thinking and an egalitarian spirit that many other metropolitan areas envy.
Despite these strengths, however, the region does not work for everyone. Although the Twin Cities metropolitan area is blessed with good incomes and high educational attainment rates, some groups and some places are still lagging behind. In a region where household income is among the highest in the nation, black household income is among the lowest. In a region that has the highest share of adults with a high school diploma in the country, it only ranks 40th among the 100 largest metropolitan areas for Latino high school educational attainment.
source: http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2005/10cities_sohmer.aspx
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Letters to the Editor: Peak oil; Indy stores; Respect; Dunce; Superpowers
Thanks for thought-provoking articles on Peak Oil issue
I want to discuss an issue that your weekly publication has definitely subscribed to: Peak Oil. Since many of your readers are familiar with it, why not use it as a rally cry to change the lives of its readers? Why not set aside a small portion of the paper to its solutions? What about adding a forum for this subject to your website?
Currently I am deployed to Iraq—for whatever reason people think we are here—well, except for making America freer. Who am I helping out by being here? Our generators, SUVs and Humvees alone use hundreds of gallons a day. The war is a huge drag on our economy.
Now, I have wanted to prepare for the Long Emergency for quite some time. I sold my car in March of 2003 in protest of the war and [our government’s involvement with] Saudi Arabia. (I also participated in the anti-war March in October of 2002—where Wellstone was going to be speaking.) If I wasn’t deployed this year, I was going to take out a community garden and learn how to manage an organic garden. Instead my girlfriend has been doing work on her grandma’s garden in Michigan.
While in Iraq, I purchased a book on Intentional Communities from an organization that promotes them at IC.org. I honestly feel that cooperative community arrangements are the only solutions to surviving the Long Emergency. I have found many communes, but few are truly prepared for post-oil.
I have meditated on which regions of America would be most suitable to survive post-oil. I used to think that the Pacific Northwest region of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia were good candidates. After reading James Howard Kunstler’s arguments against this region, however, I would have to agree with him.
The best place, post-oil, that I can find currently is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The soil is quite good for agriculture. The area has an aging population—the oldest in the Midwest, which is already aging. The area is sparsely populated—on average only seven people per square kilometer.
Post-oil, the region would be isolated from the lower part of the state of Michigan, and could become a separate entity if the state government is not sustainable. A hint of this is that Escanaba has an annual Upper Peninsula State Fair. Also the region is surrounded by the Great Lakes, which will be a valuable transportation asset post-oil.
The southern portion of the Upper Peninsula near Lake Michigan has a growing season similar to that of Missouri, so the area has a longer growing season than anywhere in Minnesota.
I would like to say that Minnesotans have a good chance to make it—and I think that many will. But looking at our sprawled out Twin Cities—and the “interstate cities”—these places are unstable and will not make it. There are too many people here for life to become sustainable. We do have many good things going for us—the cooperative businesses and organic farms.
I feel that those who live in the Twin Cities should strive to meet the challenges of the Long Emergency. There are many opportunities currently that will allow civilization to continue going in some form. I hope that the Pulse can make this a long-term issue for positive change in our communities.
I think that an investment in the Upper Peninsula for an eco-village would be the best solution in the Midwest. I have contacted an organization doing just this in various locations. They have expressed interest in the Upper Peninsula — but only if I can find others who are potentially interested.
I consider myself a pretty committed individual in preparing for the Long Emergency. I only became conscious of the subject in the fall of 2002, and decided it would be smart to wean myself from the car culture. I am out of the active guard in May of 2006 and will be on IRR (aka I will probably be drafted) until 2008. Hopefully I have as much time as all of you in Minnesota—but I am currently trapped by something out of my control.
So I have been going on those “Support the Troops” websites asking for books on organic gardening and other useful endeavors post-oil. I have only received a couple books thus far—and a whole lot of care packages containing useful items while here—but not post-oil. And the bunch of tiny folded flags won’t mean anything if I’m trying to grow food for my survival in 2015.
I really can’t wait to return to Minneapolis and have a library with such diverse resources again!
I love your paper, but really dislike some of the partisan hatred I sometimes feel emanates from it. With peak-oil an actual issue, it is time to be inclusive. Survival is not a partisan issue. As one individual wisely stated on the subject of the Long Emergency: “Competition was the watchword of the ascent, cooperation will be the foundation of the descent.”
Kevin Chavis
Iraq
Editor’s note: Your letter is one of the best we have ever received—thank you. Please continue to write us about both your experiences in Iraq and your thoughts on a post-oil future. Brian Kaller - Managing Editor, Pulse
source: http://www.pulsetc.com/article.php?op=Print&sid=1930
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Warmed Over
The U.S. Senate's leading abuser of science has struck again. Not content with calling the notion of human-caused global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" (as he did in a July 2003 Senate floor speech), last week James Inhofe returned with an "update" on climate-change science. In his latest speech, timed to coincide with the final steps toward implementation of the Kyoto Protocol (which the United States won't be joining), Inhofe asserted that "put simply, man-induced global warming is an article of religious faith." Clearly, he hasn't changed his tune.
What separates Inhofe’s fixation from similar conservative crusades is just how brazenly it ignores what scientists know with confidence about global warming. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Meteorological Society all broadly agree on this basic point: Temperatures are rising, at least in part as a result of human greenhouse-gas emissions. According to the World Meteorological Organization, 2004 was the fourth-hottest year since 1861, while the past 10 years (excepting 1996) were "among the warmest 10 years on record."
That's not all. Drawing on highly sophisticated computer models, climate scientists can project -- not predict -- how much temperatures may rise by, say, 2100 if we carry on with business as usual. Although scenarios vary, some get pretty severe. So do the projected impacts of climate change: rising sea levels, species extinctions, glacial melting, and so forth.
One might argue, perhaps, that humanity should simply adapt to climatic changes rather than restricting fossil-fuel use. But that's not Inhofe's approach. No matter how strong the evidence of ongoing climate change gets, he simply rejects it. But backed into a corner, Inhofe's arguments have necessarily grown more and more desperate.
For example, in his latest speech, Inhofe continued his curious crusade against a single University of Virginia climate expert, Michael Mann. Mann initially became a target for global warming "skeptics" in 2001 after the IPCC prominently cited his work to show that recent temperatures represent an anomaly in the context of the past 1,000 years. The IPCC reproduced a graph published by Mann and his colleagues that's often referred to as a "hockey stick" because of its shape: After a long, relatively straight line, temperatures spike up in the 20th century.
Ever since then, global warming deniers (and especially Inhofe) have been trying to break the "hockey stick," but their attacks on Mann represent a grand diversion. Although in his latest speech Inhofe refers only to "the hockey stick graph, constructed by Dr. Michael Mann and colleagues," multiple other scientists have produced similar analyses. And even if all of these were to be overturned, that would hardly upend the conclusion that humans are currently heating the planet -- a robust scientific finding based on several different lines of evidence. Rather, shattering the "hockey stick" would merely leave us uncertain as to whether the current temperature spike has any precedent over the past millennium.
In fact, Inhofe's latest foray against Mann throws into question the competence of the senator's scientific-research apparatus. Inhofe charged that recent critics, arguing in the scientific literature, have called Mann's hockey-stick work "just bad science." But the critics in question weren't attacking the "hockey stick" at all. Rather, they were challenging an entirely different paper by Mann and a colleague, and the disagreement concerns the period between 1971 and 1998 -- not the past 1,000 years. It looks as though Inhofe went rifling through the scientific literature to find someone criticizing Michael Mann without even bothering to understand the context of that criticism.
Yet Inhofe's latest speech stoops even lower than this. The senator also implied, on the slender basis of a Washington Post cartoon (which he misinterprets), that some "alarmists" think climate change triggered the recent Asian tsunami. "Are we to believe now that global warming is causing earthquakes?" Inhofe asked rhetorically.
Answer: No, we aren't to believe that. No one believes that.
In criticizing environmental "alarmists" for something that none of them have said, Inhofe has created as big a straw man as we've seen in politics lately. Yet when it comes to climate change, Inhofe doesn't seem to care whether he has a sound argument to make, so long as he has something contrary to say that takes at least some effort to deconstruct.
Let's take one more glance at the way Inhofe abuses climate science. In his latest speech, Inhofe took aim at a recently released report from the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, produced by some 300 scientists working under the auspices of the Arctic Council (an intergovernmental group that includes the United States). The report shows that human-caused climate change has already had a pronounced effect in the Arctic region, where average temperatures have shot up "at almost twice the rate as the rest of the world in the past few decades." The result? Ongoing impacts such as melting glaciers and sea ice.
These conclusions come from a body of scientific experts who have studied the problem for four years. What does James Inhofe do when faced with such a major, peer-reviewed scientific consensus document? The same thing he always does: He draws on a tiny number of skeptic scientists, here pointing out that Arctic temperatures in the 1930s and 1940s rival those today, to challenge the consensus. But while 1930s and 1940s Arctic temperatures were probably caused by natural variation, today's temperature spike seems to have a human fingerprint. That's the whole point.
Throughout his speech, moreover, Inhofe made constant reference to a work of fiction: Michael Crichton's new novel, State of Fear. Calling Crichton a "scientist" -- actually, he's an M.D. -- Inhofe credited the author with telling "the real story about global warming" to the public. In fact, Crichton's new book misrepresents climate science nearly as badly as Inhofe does. Inhofe further suggested that Crichton's depictions of environmentalists -- as fear-mongers who hype the possibility of disasters to bring in donations -- show "art imitating life." Actually, Crichton's notion of a global eco-terrorist conspiracy, aided and abetted by leading environmental organizations, seems more than a tad conspiratorial.
Nevertheless, we haven't heard the last from Senator Crank. Speaking of the remaining cadre of climate-science "skeptics," Inhofe pledged in his latest speech: "I will do my part to make sure that they are heard." In other words, he will continue to challenge each new major piece of scientific evidence on climate, raising dubious criticisms rather than trying in earnest to understand the best science. And this is the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works talking.
Chris Mooney is a Prospect senior correspondent. His book on the politicization of science will be published later this year by Basic Books. His daily blog and other writings can be found at www.chriscmooney.com.
By Chris Mooney
Reprinted with permission from The American Prospect, 5 Broad Street, Boston, MA 02109. All rights reserved.
source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/11/opinion/main666190.shtml
What separates Inhofe’s fixation from similar conservative crusades is just how brazenly it ignores what scientists know with confidence about global warming. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Meteorological Society all broadly agree on this basic point: Temperatures are rising, at least in part as a result of human greenhouse-gas emissions. According to the World Meteorological Organization, 2004 was the fourth-hottest year since 1861, while the past 10 years (excepting 1996) were "among the warmest 10 years on record."
That's not all. Drawing on highly sophisticated computer models, climate scientists can project -- not predict -- how much temperatures may rise by, say, 2100 if we carry on with business as usual. Although scenarios vary, some get pretty severe. So do the projected impacts of climate change: rising sea levels, species extinctions, glacial melting, and so forth.
One might argue, perhaps, that humanity should simply adapt to climatic changes rather than restricting fossil-fuel use. But that's not Inhofe's approach. No matter how strong the evidence of ongoing climate change gets, he simply rejects it. But backed into a corner, Inhofe's arguments have necessarily grown more and more desperate.
For example, in his latest speech, Inhofe continued his curious crusade against a single University of Virginia climate expert, Michael Mann. Mann initially became a target for global warming "skeptics" in 2001 after the IPCC prominently cited his work to show that recent temperatures represent an anomaly in the context of the past 1,000 years. The IPCC reproduced a graph published by Mann and his colleagues that's often referred to as a "hockey stick" because of its shape: After a long, relatively straight line, temperatures spike up in the 20th century.
Ever since then, global warming deniers (and especially Inhofe) have been trying to break the "hockey stick," but their attacks on Mann represent a grand diversion. Although in his latest speech Inhofe refers only to "the hockey stick graph, constructed by Dr. Michael Mann and colleagues," multiple other scientists have produced similar analyses. And even if all of these were to be overturned, that would hardly upend the conclusion that humans are currently heating the planet -- a robust scientific finding based on several different lines of evidence. Rather, shattering the "hockey stick" would merely leave us uncertain as to whether the current temperature spike has any precedent over the past millennium.
In fact, Inhofe's latest foray against Mann throws into question the competence of the senator's scientific-research apparatus. Inhofe charged that recent critics, arguing in the scientific literature, have called Mann's hockey-stick work "just bad science." But the critics in question weren't attacking the "hockey stick" at all. Rather, they were challenging an entirely different paper by Mann and a colleague, and the disagreement concerns the period between 1971 and 1998 -- not the past 1,000 years. It looks as though Inhofe went rifling through the scientific literature to find someone criticizing Michael Mann without even bothering to understand the context of that criticism.
Yet Inhofe's latest speech stoops even lower than this. The senator also implied, on the slender basis of a Washington Post cartoon (which he misinterprets), that some "alarmists" think climate change triggered the recent Asian tsunami. "Are we to believe now that global warming is causing earthquakes?" Inhofe asked rhetorically.
Answer: No, we aren't to believe that. No one believes that.
In criticizing environmental "alarmists" for something that none of them have said, Inhofe has created as big a straw man as we've seen in politics lately. Yet when it comes to climate change, Inhofe doesn't seem to care whether he has a sound argument to make, so long as he has something contrary to say that takes at least some effort to deconstruct.
Let's take one more glance at the way Inhofe abuses climate science. In his latest speech, Inhofe took aim at a recently released report from the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, produced by some 300 scientists working under the auspices of the Arctic Council (an intergovernmental group that includes the United States). The report shows that human-caused climate change has already had a pronounced effect in the Arctic region, where average temperatures have shot up "at almost twice the rate as the rest of the world in the past few decades." The result? Ongoing impacts such as melting glaciers and sea ice.
These conclusions come from a body of scientific experts who have studied the problem for four years. What does James Inhofe do when faced with such a major, peer-reviewed scientific consensus document? The same thing he always does: He draws on a tiny number of skeptic scientists, here pointing out that Arctic temperatures in the 1930s and 1940s rival those today, to challenge the consensus. But while 1930s and 1940s Arctic temperatures were probably caused by natural variation, today's temperature spike seems to have a human fingerprint. That's the whole point.
Throughout his speech, moreover, Inhofe made constant reference to a work of fiction: Michael Crichton's new novel, State of Fear. Calling Crichton a "scientist" -- actually, he's an M.D. -- Inhofe credited the author with telling "the real story about global warming" to the public. In fact, Crichton's new book misrepresents climate science nearly as badly as Inhofe does. Inhofe further suggested that Crichton's depictions of environmentalists -- as fear-mongers who hype the possibility of disasters to bring in donations -- show "art imitating life." Actually, Crichton's notion of a global eco-terrorist conspiracy, aided and abetted by leading environmental organizations, seems more than a tad conspiratorial.
Nevertheless, we haven't heard the last from Senator Crank. Speaking of the remaining cadre of climate-science "skeptics," Inhofe pledged in his latest speech: "I will do my part to make sure that they are heard." In other words, he will continue to challenge each new major piece of scientific evidence on climate, raising dubious criticisms rather than trying in earnest to understand the best science. And this is the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works talking.
Chris Mooney is a Prospect senior correspondent. His book on the politicization of science will be published later this year by Basic Books. His daily blog and other writings can be found at www.chriscmooney.com.
By Chris Mooney
Reprinted with permission from The American Prospect, 5 Broad Street, Boston, MA 02109. All rights reserved.
source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/11/opinion/main666190.shtml
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Cynthia McKinney Victory Speech: "It's a New Day"
Click here for webcast of speech.
Good evening.
It's a new day, ya'll!
And the evidence is a clear and convincing victory handed to us by the people of the Fourth Congressional District.
Twelve years ago, Georgia's History Train pulled off from the Georgia Legislature, rolling down the tracks to the United States Congress.
And for 10 years, The History Train gathered momentum.
We rode that train: through poverty and plenty; picking up warriors for justice all over America.
The History Train chugged along with full faith and confidence in the American dream.
Tonight signifies that the History Train is once again gathering steam, but it's also clear that the History Train is changing tracks: taking a new path for community and country.
Sending a strong message that a new way of thinking for ourselves and our future is taking hold.
Ten years ago, the History Train took us through Georgia towns big and small, like Washington, Georgia, the hometown of the most recently fallen Georgia hero in Iraq.
Sadly, now, another Georgia family must feel the pain of George Bush's war machine.
Tonight I say, "Bring our sons and daughters home now" and commend to you this beautiful watercolor expressing what I've been saying for the past year.
I predict that the American people will send a resounding message tonight that the war machine--must stop now.
But there's another kind of machine of which we must beware that lurks among us: and that's the corporate propaganda machine.
Leaders who dare go against, or merely even question, the policies being polished by a slick media machine can get sucked up, chewed up, eaten up, devoured.
Or in a familiar set of words more famous than my own: "expose, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" such leadership. "To pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them." These words are straight from the FBI during its program to counter dissent in this country.
And as we have seen in the cases of both, these immensely powerful and monied machines take their aim directly at the people.
Breaking free of the influence of both these machines heralds a new way of thinking. And that's what this campaign was all about.
We really believe:
that a multitude of people can outweigh any special interest every time; that media magic has little persuasion over an informed people; that we as a people are way more powerful when we turn to each other and not on each other; and that we can embrace the human rainbow, celebrate our diversity, focus on our commonality, and together, tear down the mightiest walls of oppression and injustice.
Evidence of the power of this new way of thinking is here tonight in this room and in our election numbers.
And so commanding is our presence, and significant is our mission that what we have now accomplished in Georgia's Fourth Congressional District, is being broadcast by the best of America's corporate media: Who said the revolution wasn't going to be televised?
This campaign represents a movement to bring America together: Blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos; together; Muslim, Jew, Christian, Hindu; together; Those who still hum Dinah Washington tunes, together with those singing Tupac.
What we represent is the future of America: a first step in taking our country back, freeing ourselves so we can liberate others.
It's a new day, and it belongs to us. Now is our time, and seize it we must.
In 1901, George White, the last remaining black Member of Congress during Reconstruction addressed the United States House of Representatives. Black Members of Congress had been sent home after Jim Crow laws gathered steam across the South. When he, too, had been affected, George White had this to say:
This is perhaps the Negro's temporary farewell to the American Congress. But phoenix-like, he will rise up some day and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised and bleeding, but God-fearing people; faithful, industrious, loyal, rising people--full of potential force."
People across the Fourth District and across our country bind together: outraged, heart-broken, bruised and bleeding, but also full of potential force. Many among us have been knocked down, but not a one of us is too wounded to not get back up again.
Tonight is a victory for the people of the Fourth Congressional District and for a new way of thinking.
We celebrate that the History Train rides again.
And invite onboard all who share our values and still believe that America can be a force for good at home and in the world.
Thank you to the voters who came out in record numbers and gave their vote of confidence.
Thank you to all the volunteers (from far and near) who worked day in and day out to make this victory possible;
Thank you to the alternative media who kept our story relevant and thank you to all of you.
Thank you and good night.
It's a new day, ya'll!
And the evidence is a clear and convincing victory handed to us by the people of the Fourth Congressional District.
Twelve years ago, Georgia's History Train pulled off from the Georgia Legislature, rolling down the tracks to the United States Congress.
And for 10 years, The History Train gathered momentum.
We rode that train: through poverty and plenty; picking up warriors for justice all over America.
The History Train chugged along with full faith and confidence in the American dream.
Tonight signifies that the History Train is once again gathering steam, but it's also clear that the History Train is changing tracks: taking a new path for community and country.
Sending a strong message that a new way of thinking for ourselves and our future is taking hold.
Ten years ago, the History Train took us through Georgia towns big and small, like Washington, Georgia, the hometown of the most recently fallen Georgia hero in Iraq.
Sadly, now, another Georgia family must feel the pain of George Bush's war machine.
Tonight I say, "Bring our sons and daughters home now" and commend to you this beautiful watercolor expressing what I've been saying for the past year.
I predict that the American people will send a resounding message tonight that the war machine--must stop now.
But there's another kind of machine of which we must beware that lurks among us: and that's the corporate propaganda machine.
Leaders who dare go against, or merely even question, the policies being polished by a slick media machine can get sucked up, chewed up, eaten up, devoured.
Or in a familiar set of words more famous than my own: "expose, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" such leadership. "To pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them." These words are straight from the FBI during its program to counter dissent in this country.
And as we have seen in the cases of both, these immensely powerful and monied machines take their aim directly at the people.
Breaking free of the influence of both these machines heralds a new way of thinking. And that's what this campaign was all about.
We really believe:
that a multitude of people can outweigh any special interest every time; that media magic has little persuasion over an informed people; that we as a people are way more powerful when we turn to each other and not on each other; and that we can embrace the human rainbow, celebrate our diversity, focus on our commonality, and together, tear down the mightiest walls of oppression and injustice.
Evidence of the power of this new way of thinking is here tonight in this room and in our election numbers.
And so commanding is our presence, and significant is our mission that what we have now accomplished in Georgia's Fourth Congressional District, is being broadcast by the best of America's corporate media: Who said the revolution wasn't going to be televised?
This campaign represents a movement to bring America together: Blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos; together; Muslim, Jew, Christian, Hindu; together; Those who still hum Dinah Washington tunes, together with those singing Tupac.
What we represent is the future of America: a first step in taking our country back, freeing ourselves so we can liberate others.
It's a new day, and it belongs to us. Now is our time, and seize it we must.
In 1901, George White, the last remaining black Member of Congress during Reconstruction addressed the United States House of Representatives. Black Members of Congress had been sent home after Jim Crow laws gathered steam across the South. When he, too, had been affected, George White had this to say:
This is perhaps the Negro's temporary farewell to the American Congress. But phoenix-like, he will rise up some day and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised and bleeding, but God-fearing people; faithful, industrious, loyal, rising people--full of potential force."
People across the Fourth District and across our country bind together: outraged, heart-broken, bruised and bleeding, but also full of potential force. Many among us have been knocked down, but not a one of us is too wounded to not get back up again.
Tonight is a victory for the people of the Fourth Congressional District and for a new way of thinking.
We celebrate that the History Train rides again.
And invite onboard all who share our values and still believe that America can be a force for good at home and in the world.
Thank you to the voters who came out in record numbers and gave their vote of confidence.
Thank you to all the volunteers (from far and near) who worked day in and day out to make this victory possible;
Thank you to the alternative media who kept our story relevant and thank you to all of you.
Thank you and good night.
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