When are you too old for us but not for Lauderdale?

I have always felt that mandatory retirement ages are unfair. As I age, I probably think so even more.

I cannot imagine why anybody would want to be a police officer after age 65, but I have wondered why anybody would want to be one at 25 also.

But per this morning’s DPP one local police officer is being forced to retire later this month. Chief Harrington [or presumably the Mayor or anybody else] cannot help him, it seems, since the matter is determined by statute, a law which apparently only refers to police and fire employees in cities of the first class.

I don’t believe that I have met John Morrow who has been with the department since 1967, longer than anybody else now on the department, but it would seem unlikely that I will now, and all because of a law that makes no sense.

If the newspaper coverage is correct, the statue applies to all employees in the P.D., not just officers. And it only applies to cities of the first class [us, Minneapolis, and Duluth].

Translated it means that anybody who works for the department has to be under 65, even if the job does not involve any special risk or physical activity. I don’t know how the people who maintain police equipment and facilities are employed, but this would seem to include people who file paperwork, repair the vehicles, and mop the floors as well as John Morrow. And it means that Maplewood or Hilltop or Landfall or Coates could hire somebody over 65 to be on their police department, but Saint Paul cannot. We keep forgetting that “suburb” begins with “sub-“ indicating something less. Yet somehow a lesser government has more rights than a real city.

It would seem that although it would be too late for Mr. Morrow, that our legislators should address this at its next opportunity. [Of course, some of our legislators are busy doing their own law enforcement work, already. See post below.]

Need a cop? Call a pol?

We are having cuts in LGA and other challenges to keeping enough police and other public servants working for us.

But we seem to have found a new source of public safety employment: Elected officials.

Yesterday’s paper told how Councilmember Melvin Carter III helped make a bust on an alleged pimp. Mayor Coleman the Second did a stint as a traffic cop a three years ago and Dan Bostrom [who is a retired cop] helped with an apprehension of a gun-toter a couple of years ago. And the late Councilmember Jim Reiter rode around in a retired police car looking to help out.

And today we learn how Senator Ellen Anderson became a bicycle theft detective.

Mayors used to have badge #1 and councilmembers also carried badges. Charlie McCarty used his enough to break up fights in the downtown White Castle and interfere [help?] in a hostage situation in the Hamline-Midway area [the same incident for which retired officer James Mann was belatedly honored earlier this year].

I don’t think councilmember are allowed to carry badges anymore and I don’t know if our mayor does.

But maybe we should look into it.

Just some post-convention thoughts

Our local political and business leaders were exultant when it was announced that the GOP convention was coming to town. They are all educated and plugged-in men and women who should have known what all was involved.

There are things that we all should have known the day that announcement was made.

> There would be extensive media present, both traditional and non-traditional.

> There would be protesters, both traditional and confrontational.

> There would be police action required both to make the site secure and to observe the protesters and take whatever action needed to be taken.

> There would be confrontations and post-convention second-guessing about everything, including the degree and type of police involvement. Security concerns would entail street and sidewalk closings and making innocent people of whom nothing evil could be reasonably inferred subject to stops, searches, and even seizures.

> While some businesses in the host city would see improvement in their business climate, others would suffer.

.

Every city which was trying to get the convention knew these things and yet they tried to get the convention anyway. We were the winners who of course received no victory. [And in our case since we had a larger city immediately adjacent, we didn’t even get our name on many of the stories.]

Now our leaders are telling us how well we [and they] handled it all. Well, we did get through things relatively well, but there were problems. We knew that would happen too when we learned that we were the winners in the contest to host. Neither protesters nor police nor anybody else always act in the best and most professional manner even in the most normal and sedate circumstances, so mistakes were inevitable. Nobody is perfect. So now we are going to have second guessing ad infinitum about whether the reaction of our police and the officers from other cities who came to help handled things well or whether they may have overreacted.

I have heard from both protesters and people sympathetic to the police regarding the events of the first four days of this month. I am unsure who deserves the most blame and even more unsure that we can ever know and wonder why we really want to put up our own tally sheets on these things.

We do need to have our political and police leaders check into what happened to find out where they erred so that they can take action against appropriate parties and adopt measures to avoid repeat behavior, but they need to be doing that all the time anyway. And we can hope that the protesters and “anarchists” do similar introspections.

And, unfortunately, we know that some of the same things will happen again, here and elsewhere, no matter what approach we take.

And we might consider removing a sheriff who believes in holding people until a warrant can be obtained. O.J. Simpson is on trial right now for doing pretty much the same thing, but for him they call it “kidnapping.”

Quick note -- law enforcement Reaganomics

We’re getting police officers from Cedar Rapids, Iowa to help us during the GOP convention!?? [story]

This sounds like the Reaganomics of law and order.

Phalen Park Crime Meeting

I am much more likely to attend meetings that communities call and have public officials come to than I am those which are called by the authorities [often without checking on what else may be simultaneously happening in the community] for the public to attend. That was not the primary reason that I did not attend last night’s meeting at the Phalen Recreation Center dealing with three recent Phalen Park crimes, but I have to admit that I was not there and am relying on what other have said about the meeting.

I have read the newspaper coverage and saw some of the local television coverage. It looked like a meeting attended by the usual people and quite a few more [Laura Pabst of MS-J&T estimates attendance at 200] . It seems that those present learned that the mayor, councilmember, and police chief are against crime and that the three crimes seem to have no common factor except for geography.

In general, crime is down. The stats are supposed to make us feel more comfortable. Having been the uninjured victim of a statistically rare but violent crime myself [not on the East Side], I do not find this much of an answer. Victims don’t care about the numbers.

I have often questioned what meetings like this accomplish. It’s kind of like the righteous in the world meeting in church, shouting Hallelujahs and thanking the Lord that they aren’t like those people.

But, based on what I have picked up from other sources, there may have been some gains from the meeting. It does appear that some linking of community organizations in crime prevention and neighborhood nuisance work has been accelerated by more people getting together at the same time and place.

Media links:

DPP, MS-J&T, KAAL