College campuses across the country organized a nationwide walkout Wednesday to show solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protests that are spreading to several other states, including Minnesota, over the next week.

Occupy Colleges, the student-led version of the ongoing New York City-based protests, continued the theme of economic justice and an end to corporate influence in politics, but added a call for improving equality within higher education.

There was a planned walkout effort at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus, according to the Minnesota Daily, although it doesn’t appear to have impacted the operation of the University. Demonstrations also took place in neighboring states, including at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, according to the Badger Herald.

In other parts of the country, students voiced their grievances about rocketing student debt and spiraling job opportunities. Students in New York left class to join the Manhattan Wall Street occupation, the Huffington Post reported. Those New York protests drew tens of thousands of people, according to NPR.

At the University of Texas in Austin, roughly 50 students holding signs and chanting slogans mimicked protests of rising unemployment and corporate welfare in other cities like Boston and Chicago, according to our sister publication the Texas Independent. But the students also focused on higher education issues, like rising tuition costs, program cuts and staff layoffs.

Jonathan Cronin, a lead organizer of the citywide Occupy Austin protest planned Thursday, told the Texas Independent that the Occupy movement is in the spirit of Egypt’s Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring protests, as well as the labor rallies that took place earlier this year in Wisconsin. Cronin said the protests signal a fundamental desire to reevaluate American priorities as it applies to representing the working class, or the “99 percent” — a term which refers to the country’s elite one percent who carry home with them some 24 percent of the national income.

“While the extreme excess and wealth continues to grow, the vast majority of Americans are just trying to make ends meet without being weighed down by increased financial burdens,” said Cronin, who is also a student at Austin Community College. “The protests deliver a sense of empowerment to show we need a political process that benefits us all equally.”

A Minnesota branch of the Occupy Wall Street movement plans to occupy a site in downtown Minneapolis Friday. Organizers said they’re holding planning meetings Thursday. The movement has earned the endorsements of a number of big unions, as well as the support of U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison.

Sixty-three current and former law school faculty members from the University of Minnesota signed an open letter to state legislators on Wednesday urging them to vote against a bill that would put an anti-gay marriage question on the 2012 ballot. The lawyers said the constitutional amendment would “cement the existing hardships” that gay and lesbian families now face and cause costly legal fights for the state down the road.

“The proposed amendment would set in constitutional cement the existing hardships on thousands of families, including children, that many in the legal profession serve,” the group wrote. “Attorneys practicing in such diverse areas as family law, estate planning, real estate, tax, and beyond represent people across Minnesota who confront complex legal challenges because they are currently unable to enter a legally-recognized relationship with a same-sex partner.”

Minnesota’s same-sex couples current face 515 such legal challenges, from serious issues involving taxes and end-of-life issues to more mundane concerns such as the inability to purchase a family fishing license, according to a report by Project 515.

The professors also argued that the amendment could have unintended legal consequences.

“The potential applications of an amendment and its collateral consequences in other areas of the law could be far-reaching. Frankly, the full implications of the proposed amendment are unknown,” they wrote. “Accordingly, it will likely generate litigation over both its validity and its scope; in effect, the legislature is inviting significant and needless expense for the state and its citizens during a time of extraordinary economic difficulty.”

They also questioned the need for such an amendment:

Minnesotans of good will may continue to debate the merits of legally recognizing same-sex couples through marriage or some other status. But in its entire history, Minnesota has never cut short the ordinary legislative process regarding marriage and family law by enshrining one particular view into its constitution. There is no compelling need to do so now.

Here’s the letter:

54635521-An-Open-Letter

Proposed bans on somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), a technique used in some forms of stem cell research, continue to wind their way through the legislative process as the debate over the provision has spread to the pages of newspapers statewide, mostly in opposition to the ban. Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL) has vociferously defended the ban and has attacked reporters it says have not gotten the facts right.

Currently, a ban on state and federal funding for SCNT is contained in the higher education omnibus bill that passed both the Minnesota Senate and the House, and a provision to make SCNT a crime is in the health and human services omnibus bill that awaits further debate.

In the Senate, the ban is being promoted by Sen. Michelle Fischbach (R-Paynesville), whose husband Scott Fischbach runs MCCL, an affiliate of the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC).

The American Council on Science and Health questioned the motives of those supporting the ban. The group cited a recent Minnesota Independent article that sorted out facts and myths surrounding the debate, particularly some assertions by MCCL that appear to muddle the facts surrounding the issue.

ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross came up with some possible reasons for Sen. Fischbach’s motivation: “Well, she may not be intentionally trying to mislead the public — she may just be ignorant,” he quips. “When I read stories like this about legislators ruling on scientific issues, I realize why we have all of these bans of safe and useful products — because these people have no idea what they’re talking about. They get hundreds of letters from card-toting members of the NRDC, EWG and who knows which other fringe groups, saying, ‘We need to ban this chemical for the sake of our children!’ and then, lo and behold, the legislature votes to ban it. In this case, the Minnesota Senate has been presented with the science, and yet the majority are making the issue into a moral one, although if they listened to the science, they would know it’s not even a moral issue. There is neither a scientific nor a moral reason why you should be against SCNT. Embryos aren’t harmed in the process, and it provides a vast potential to treat illnesses that are currently incurable.”

Minnesota’s major media outlets have covered the ban this week. MCCL called the Star Tribune’s Wednesday feature on the issue “hopelessly confused,” said the paper was “terribly at fault for publishing” the article and added, “The reporter, Jenna Ross, is uneducated and obviously not qualified to be writing about this subject.” They offered the same criticism of a Pioneer Press article on Thursday.

The University of Minnesota held a press conference on Thursday with families who have been helped by stem cell therapy, and although no SCNT stem cell treatments have yet been used, the university asserted that it could and that efforts to curtail research could prevent future treatments.

“The authors of this bill are trying to confuse people into thinking stem cell research, that can save so many lives, is human cloning. It is not,” said Sherri Gunvalson, whose son has a fatal form of muscular dystrophy. “If they succeed in passing this horrible bill, it will be another step in an effort to ban stem cell research in the misguided belief that somehow this ban is pro-life.”

Following the press conference, MCCL put out a statement defending the bil:

“The stories of young people being helped by the University of Minnesota Stem Cell Institute are very compelling. All Minnesotans want cures to be found. It is important to note than none of the patients who shared their stories today were helped by human cloning. The legislation that is currently under consideration would in no way affect existing adult or embryonic stem cell research. The proposed ban on human cloning does one thing — it bans human cloning. Numerous countries across the globe have done the same thing, and the United Nations has also called for a ban on all forms of human cloning. We repeat our call for research to be done at the U of M that is ethical and life affirming.”

What MCCL leaves out is that the United Nations is currently reopening the debate on whether to ban the actual cloning of human beings while allowing SCNT, also called therapeutic cloning, to continue.

MCCL and Fischbach have rejected efforts to amend legislation to clarify the difference between reproductive cloning — the creation of a new human being through SCNT — and therapeutic cloning, which creates a low number of cells, for research.

As Sen. Ron Latz (DFL-St. Louis Park) notes in a recent press release, “Their so-called ban on cloning does nothing more than impose a very conservative religious definition of when life begins on the scope of scientific stem cell research in Minnesota.”

And the energy expended by the Legislature may be all for naught; MinnPost reported on Thursday that Gov. Mark Dayton is likely to veto any provision in the budget bills dealing with “human cloning” bans.

Albert Yonas, Ph.D.

Dr. Al Yonas, who leads a lab at the university’s Institute of Child Development, discussed his plans to launch a program to intervene early in the life of those suffering with the condition.

“The underlying idea is that if we’re reaching these children earlier than adults are being treated, we’re hoping we’re going to see more improvement than we’re seeing in research on adults,” said Yonas in an interview posted in December. He declined to say when the treatment center would open.

According to the institute’s website, until recently most of the research has focused on adults. Another barrier to diagnosis, Yonas says, is a lack of awareness.

But science may be getting help from literature on the latter challenge. Two critically acclaimed books in late 2010 shine the spotlight on the disorder. Oliver Sacks, the author of “Awakenings,” which inspired the movie, released a book called “The Mind’s Eye in October.” It chronicles a series of creative people adapting to visual disabilities, including face blindness. Sacks, a neurologist at the Columbia University Medical Center, suffers with prosopagnosia.

Another writer impacted by the condition, Heather Sellers, released her memoir, “You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know: A True Story of Family, Face Blindness, and Forgiveness,” in October. The book discusses her combined struggles with severe prosopagnosia along with her dysfunctional family, including a mother with schizophrenia.

Sellers, a writer and poet teaching at Hope College in Holland, Mich., often warns new students that she will not be able to recognize them. She agrees with Yonas that diagnosis is a major challenge, since no single test can guarantee a perfect appraisal. Diagnosed as an adult, she recalls the challenges of recognizing her condition.

“It’s much harder to present your problem if you’ve had prosopagnosia your whole life, as I have,” Sellers said in the Dec. 1 post on her blog for Psychology Today. “I simply didn’t know faces could be recognized in any special way.”

Yonas and the researchers assisting him in his lab have developed several tests for prosopagnosia. In the process, they have collected data from about 200 control subjects, largely children in St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Como Student Community Cooperative. Photo: Chris Steller

The University of Minnesota has quickly, if quietly, begun to address threats posed by a toxic waste dump it discovered under student family housing in Southeast Minneapolis.

The university found the toxins under three buildings on a four-city-block residential complex last year.

On Sept. 18, 2008, workers digging a trench at the Como Student Community Cooperative found ash and debris in the ground at its complex. Samples tested that day showed high levels of several toxins, including arsenic and lead. More tests revealed more hazards, so within days, on an emergency basis, the university hauled away 558 tons of contaminated dirt to a landfill in Rosemount.

The university last week finished the first phase of cleanup work, bringing the total amount of soil removed so far to 10,000 tons.

For generations, children have lived and played on the land along East Hennepin Avenue between 27th and 29th avenues SE. And for generations, it seems, the soil around the houses has held rich deposits of lead and arsenic — so much so that a handful of dirt ingested by a child, “if it was from a hot spot, could potentially cause brain damage,” according to Lynne Grigor, project coordinator at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Toxins were detected from eight inches to eight feet below ground. Forty-eight soil tests revealed no pattern to the hot spots that would allow targeted removal.

Acting rapidly (compared to the usual pace for such projects) with more than $700,000 from Hennepin County and about $200,000 of its own money, the university last week finished the first phase of cleanup around two of the buildings, hauling away another 9,457 tons of soil.

With another application pending with the county’s brownfield fund, the university hopes to complete the cleanup next year.

Evidence of widespread effects on residents has not emerged. Several children have been tested, CSCC residents and staff said, but no one had heard of anyone showing high lead levels. University of Minnesota Environmental Health specialist Janet Dalgliesh said she knows of one case of elevated levels, for an unrelated toxin.

But it’s unclear whether that’s because the toxic dirt from the dump hasn’t affected anyone, or because people who have been affected haven’t yet been tested.

Jim Kelly, a health risk assessor at the Minnesota Department of Health, said his agency gets involved when local authorities request public health advice, or when blood tests reveal elevated lead levels in children. Neither has happened yet with CSCC, where several people said that the only tests specially spurred by the discovery — on older boys who dug deep in the dirt — didn’t have alarming results.

State law requires notification to the department only if a child younger than age six has more than 15 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, explained Erik Zabel, who works with immigrant populations for the department’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. The brains of children develop more quickly at that age and they’re more likely to get dirt in their mouths, he said.

In any case, Zabel said, the state doesn’t have responsibility to inspect for lead in Minneapolis, which has its own health department and lead-poisoning prevention programs, as well as a good rate of kids being tested.

Who knew what when?

Families of international students — married or in domestic partnerships — occupy just over half of CSCC’s 360 apartments (48 percent are from the United States or Canada, 18 percent from China). About 40 percent of the families have children, for a total population of about 1,000, according to General Manager Gerald Erickson, who has been at CSCC for 30 years and said he was surprised to learn about the pollution after the contractors found it last year.

CSCC from above. Toxins were found in soil around the three buildings at the north (upper) end of the complex. Photo: Google Maps

Once the contamination was discovered, Erickson said he left communication about it to the university’s Environmental Health staff, which provided email updates and fliers for residents and spoke at three co-op board meetings.

Board president Kendra Hernandez said the university offered to hold a special meeting for CSCC residents, but the board declined after no residents showed up at its board meeting for an announced university presentation on the topic. “There was never really a huge outcry” among residents, Hernandez said. The biggest complaint may have been about the orange fencing that kept people off the CSCC’s one recreation field and playground with swings. (An on-site child care center also used those play spaces, according to CSCC staff.)

One resident of a building where soil is being replaced, Rachel Dittli, said she considered the notices residents received adequate. But her husband, Albin, said he had concerns about dirt from the cleanup work blowing through windows into the apartment, including onto their kitchen table.

Another resident, Kaying Thao, has been less satisfied with the information she has seen since moving to a CSCC apartment in June. When she heard workers were removing ash, she thought they meant trees. Thao first learned details about the pollution Nov. 4, at a meeting of the broader neighborhood group, the Southeast Como Improvement Association (SECIA), which has made environmental efforts a priority since a pair of nearby chemical-plant fires in the late 1990s.

Two possibly affected populations are more in the dark. Residents living across the street only got notice about the pollution last week, thanks to a SECIA volunteer. Grigor said her agency will review whether adjacent properties can join the queue for state Superfund money. SECIA Environmental Coordinator Justin Eibenholtzl said he was disappointed that neither neighbors or the neighborhood group were notified.

Grigor said the pollution-control agency was also concerned about past residents of the dump-site housing, who wouldn’t know about the pollution at their former homes and may have moved to other polluted areas, increasing risks due to cumulative exposure. But while the MPCA has sometimes tried to track down people in similar situations, the health risks at CSCC aren’t high enough to trigger that sort of response, she said.

People tend to live at CSCC for only two to four years (and must move after seven), so exposure periods for individual residents are limited — a consideration in assessing risks, said the university’s Dalgleish. Short stays meant risks haven’t been “undue,” she said, but once the university learned of the pollution, any risk beyond a residential standard was “unacceptable.”

But high turnover at CSCC also means thousands of former residents don’t know they were living on a toxic waste dump.

Theories and skeptics

How did the ash get there and why did the university build housing on it?

The ash likely came from a municipal incinerator that operated in South Minneapolis from the 1930s until 1960, said Dalgleish, but dumping stopped after the university acquired the property in 1945.

Since 1947, thousands of young parents and children have lived in homes provided by the university on that property. First came quonset huts and trailers where families of G.I. Bill veterans set up housekeeping in the 1940s and 1950s. Then in the 1970s and 1980s came CSCC.

If construction crews noticed the ash in 1982, they may have seen it more for its advantages in building foundations than for its potential hazards. Although the federal Superfund laws were in place by then, contractors’ attitudes and practices concerning polluted building sites didn’t fully change until 1990, she said.

Photo by Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

A good theory?

“I think that’s absolutely it,” said Tim Busse, a spokesman for University Services, which includes both Environmental Services and Facilities Management departments. “Attitudes have changed,” he said. The university would not build housing on an ash dump now, he said, but he doesn’t think the university is going to investigate why it happened 27 years ago. “Rather than trying to fix blame, the idea is now to fix the problem and get it cleaned up for the residents,” Busse said.

But the incinerator-dump theory has some detractors among older neighborhood residents.

Joe Stimark, who turned 87 on Monday, still lives in the house where he was born, three blocks from CSCC. He remembers playing baseball there, on what were then open fields. He can tick off the factories and other industrial neighbors down through the decades. He doesn’t remember a dump at the CSCC site.

Dave Williams, 88, a neighborhood resident since 1943, lives a block away from CSCC. Long in the excavation business, he knows how the lay of the land has been altered over the years but recalls no dump on the CSCC site. His guess: the university brought in fill to make a sloping site more level for the post-war quonset huts.

Also skeptical is Connie Sullivan, a neighborhood resident since 1977 and local historian since retiring from the university faculty. Her research shows the land sat unused as railroad property for 50 years before the university bought it.

Whenever the toxic ash arrived and whatever its source, one thing is certain: young people were playing on it. Like her father before her, Stimark’s daughter, Mary Gregg, and her neighborhood friends played hide-and-seek amid waist-high grass there in the late 1950s and 1960s, after the quonsets were gone. Boys drove go-carts there, coming home splattered with mud.

In the 1970s, intramural university softball teams played on three diamonds over the dump site, recalled alum Andy Mickel.

Now, the soil under the polluted play areas has all been removed and replaced. But the long delay put a strain on families with children, said Hernandez, the co-op board president, who coaches a kids’ soccer team on the play field. The pollution cleanup’s pace may have been quick by state standards, she said, but it didn’t feel that way to residents.

“Our big field was out of commission for so long,” she said. “People said, ‘Are they ever going to be done?’”

Photo: Paul Demko, MnIndy

Senate Democrats are salivating at the prospect of attacking Republicans in 2010 who voted against an anti-rape amendment sponsored by Al Franken, reports Politico. The provision, which was supported by 68 senators, would prevent the Department of Defense from contracting with companies that prohibit employees from suing over workplace disputes — including complaints of sexual assault.

The amendment was inspired by the story of a 19-year-old KBR employee who was gang-raped by co-workers while detailed to Iraq. Upon returning to the U.S., she learned that she was unable to sue the company because of a clause in her contract. Thirty Republicans voted against the measure, often coming up with rather tortured explanations for their votes.

“I think anyone who voted against that has some tough explaining to do,” New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told Politico. “And I think particularly some incumbents already in a challenged position — it can be very detrimental to them because women voters are going to look at that and wonder, ‘Does this senator stand on my side?’”

But Politico posits that the amendment could also prove politically problematic for Franken as he attempts to complete the transition from liberal pitbull to respected legislator.

“Franken’s amendment may make sense for national Democrats in laying down lines of attack heading into the 2010 campaign — but this is not what Franken needs to build a base in Minnesota,” Larry Jacobs, of the University of Minnesota, told Politico. “Being a poster boy of a hard-hitting campaign against the Republican Party is the opposite of what he needs in Minnesota.”

MnIndy file photo

The University of Minnesota is the latest public body to make a mess with multiple beverage-marketing deals. The U of M has canceled a contract with Red Bull because the energy-drink company’s on-campus ads conflicted with the university’s separate, exclusive contract with Coke. Last year it was the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board that couldn’t keep its dealings with the same two drinks straight.

Selling corporations exclusive access to citizen-consumers, while lucrative, creates perennial problems for public institutions.

The U of M had to back out of another deal last year, with Victoria’s Secret, after the lingerie retailer’s taste in Gopher-branded attire didn’t measure up to the university’s “image” and “values.”

Last week, the university’s marching band director denied the band had formed the TCF Bank corporate logo at the university’s new TCF Bank Stadium, so named under a $35 million contract with the bank. Rather, he said, when the student-musicians formed the letters “TCF” on the field during the opening game of the football season, they were spelling out the name of the building.

Once the line is crossed, public bodies cheerfully go above and beyond the obligations they create for themselves to corporate sponsors.

This month, the public Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission’s decision to let the Minnesota Vikings sell naming rights to various parts of the Metrodome bore fruit, as the field and several gates got new corporate names such as “Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.”

Public agencies doing double-deals with beverage multinationals and slapping corporate logos on publicly funded educational facilities is another, but the Minneapolis park board took the trend one step further in the summer of 2008, when it sold Red Bull a permit to install huge cubes marketing its product — in the guise of a photography exhibit — on the bike lanes that run down the middle of the historic Stone Arch Bridge. Several bike-pedestrian crashes ensued.

Photo: David Harvey, Flickr

We crossed a line in the turf this month when the publicly owned place where the Minnesota Vikings (alone, now) play football was renamed “Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.” Let the re-branding of one of Minnesota’s greatest statesmen begin. 

The Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, the public body that owns and operates the Humphrey Metrodome by authority of the State of Minnesota, gave its blessing for the Vikings to sell naming rights for various parts of the facility.

The Mall of America gave the Vikings an untold sum to buy naming rights to the field for three years. As the Star Tribune’s Steve Brandt points out in his “Dateline Minneapolis” column:

It’s just another example of the commercialization of the public realm in the Twin Cities. We pay most of the bill to erect stadia and arenas through sales taxes, tickets or state bonds but the sponsors who kick in the relatively few last dollars in the deal get the naming rights. There’s Target Center. Xcel Energy Center. TCF Bank Stadium. And Target Field is on the way.

Two doors down from the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota is a business-school building where every classroom carries a corporate logo. The university’s marching band has twice formed the logo for TCF Bank — at the opening game at the university’s new TCF Bank Stadium, and at the university’s final football game at what is now Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Stadium.

Brandt laments “how far we’ve ebbed in our sense of the distinction between the public and private realms.” But that’s what makes the Mall of America the perfect private purchaser for a public place-name. The mall was the site of a landmark 1999 Minnesota Supreme Court ruling that free-speech rights don’t extend to its public spaces.

Say, speaking of free speech: Here’s how one of Humphrey’s best-loved quotes – from his famous speech to the 1948 Democratic National Convention when he was mayor of Minneapolis — could be rebranded for today:

My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of naming rights, I say to them we are 29 years late. To those who say that this naming-rights program is an infringement on the state’s rights, I say this: The time has arrived for the Mall of America to help the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission to get out of the shadow of state’s rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of naming rights. People — human beings — this will be the issue of the 21st century. People of all kinds — all sorts of people — are looking to the Mall of America for leadership, and they’re looking to the Mall of America for precept and example and shopping.

Image: mnhs.org

“The Road to TCF Bank Stadium” is being shown on the Big Ten Network cable TV channel and at the U of M website (or below).

It’s 22 minutes long but apparently fills a half hour on TV, with breaks between seven sections carrying titles like “Game Day Experience” and “Teamwork.”

You can glimpse the band form the “TCF” logo in a small box during the ending credits, but it’s easier to see in a separate short showing the entire Sept. 12 opening game against Air Force in only two minutes, using time-lapse videography.

Dusk has fallen, the field lights are on, and the band comes out to form a giant “M” for Minnesota at the 1:40 mark. The students in the marching band then transform their “M” into the letters “TCF” as they appear in the bank’s ads and signs.

Update: Tim Diem, director of the university’s marching band, tells the Minnesota Independent the band was simply displaying the name of the stadium. “If they’d named it Veterans Stadium, we would have spelled out ‘Veterans,’” Diem says. He disputes that the band had formed a corporate logo: “It’s the name of the building.” The home opener at TCF Bank Stadium was the second time the band did the “TCF” formation, according to Diem. They also did it last year at the Metrodome, when like last month, he says, “We were putting on a celebration.”

The longer video has a variety of people saying nice things about the university, the stadium, and the process that got TCF Bank Stadium built. Says Dave Mona of the Gopher Radio Broadcast Team:

I was afraid I’d see a ton of advertising. You’re not going to see — This is not a NASCAR. This is a college football stadium. I think people will be pleasantly surprised. Even though there’s a lot of corporate money in here, it’s very subtle.

But those “subtle” ads and logos that do make it into the stadium reach young adults in the midst of an important rite of passage, on the cusp of becoming full-fledged consumers. As U of M child-development Prof. Rich Weinberg sees it from his bleacher seat:

It’s been almost 28 years, I believe, since we’ve had a generation of students that have had the opportunity to experience this. And I really feel strongly that it’s not just by being in the classroom that’s important, but the whole socialization as a young adult really includes this experience.

Of course, even U of M classrooms carry corporate logos these days.

In the video, you’ll watch in vain for any explanation of TCF Bank’s $35 million naming-rights deal beyond a listing for the bank under the heading “Significant Corporate Sponsors & Donors.” That blurs a line that’s distinct in the lengthy contract between the university and the bank: TCF is paying for advertising.

Yet TCF Bank Chairman Bill Cooper seems to like that line blurred. Here’s what he told Mona and Star Tribune sports columnist Sid Hartman on their “Sports Huddle” show on WCCO-AM last Sunday:

It’s kind of half charity and half business. We’ve seen a lot of business out of it.

Here’s “The Road to TCF Bank Stadium”:

Photo: Minnesota Independent

On a Saturday night last month, roughly 70 Minneapolis Hmong residents gathered at Fairview Park on the city’s North Side. They were joined by Minneapolis City Council members Barb Johnson and Don Samuels, who represent the area, to discuss relations between the Minneapolis Police Department and the Hmong community.

The meeting was prompted, in part, by a recently released study by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) that documents the paucity of Hmong police officers on the force. But also shadowing the meeting were several troubling incidents involving cops assigned to the MPD’s 4th Precinct and the Hmong community in recent years. In 2006, 19-year-old Fong Lee was shot eight times by an officer after fleeing police. Then in 2007, 22 shots were fired when police wrongly raided a Hmong family’s home during a botched drug raid.

“We’re a group that oftentimes doesn’t get heard from,” says Yia Yang, a community organizer with CURA who attended the meeting at Fairview Park. “But there’s really not that much trust with the Minneapolis Police Department.”

A couple of seemingly simple proposals came out of the meeting at Fairview Park. Representatives of the Hmong community wanted to sit down with Police Chief Tim Dolan and 4th Precinct Inspector Michael Martin to express their concerns. More concretely, they wanted a Hmong-speaking officer assigned to the day shift in the 4th Precinct as soon as possible.

The CURA study seemingly backs up the need for such a personnel move. At the time of the 2000 census, the most recent period for which figures are available, there were just under 10,000 Hmong residents of Minneapolis. Roughly 70 percent of those inhabitants were clustered in the 4th Precinct, which covers all of the city’s North Side.

But MPD recruitment has failed to keep up with demographic trends — a phenomenon that certainly isn’t limited to the Minneapolis force. The 900-officer agency has just eight Hmong police officers, representing less than one percent of the force.

Further troubling to members of the Hmong community is where those officers are assigned. More than half of the Hmong officers patrol the 5th Precinct in southwest Minneapolis, an area that is predominantly wealthy and white. Just 226 Hmong residents — or roughly two percent of the city’s overall Hmong population resided in the 5th District at the time of the 2000 census.

Meanwhile the 4th Precinct, home to the majority of Minneapolis’ Hmong population, has just two Hmong officers. What’s more, both of those cops work the overnight shift. The upshot: when Hmong residents of the North Side, many of whom are recent arrivals in this country and have limited English language skills, call the cops for help there’s generally no one available who speaks their language. Shifting one of the existing Hmong cops to the day shift in the 4th Precinct seemed like a simple, common-sense means to at least partly address the problem.

“That is what the community feels would address this problem for them,” says Don Samuels. “I’m supportive of it.”

But Samuels and others realize that getting a Hmong cop assigned to the day shift in the 4th Precinct is not as simple as it might sound. MPD’s personnel policies are governed by a labor contract with explicit rules regarding assignments and shifts. In essence, individual officers bid for assignments based on order of seniority.

“We can’t tell people where they can and cannot work,” says Sgt. Jesse Garcia, an MPD spokesman. “To actually move somebody over there would be outside of the contract and basically against their rights as an employee.”

Garcia compares it to posting a job listing for a police liaison at (predominantly-black) North Community High School and limiting it to African-American candidates. “You would be staring down the barrel of a lawsuit at some point,” he says.

Garcia also points out that the CURA study relies on outdated numbers to draw its conclusions, as the 2000 census was completed nearly a decade ago. He argues that the Hmong community is no longer so heavily concentrated on the North Side. “It has spread out through the city much more,” he says.

In addition, any deal would have to be brokered with the Minneapolis Police Federation. The police union has notoriously sharp elbows and lately has been at loggerheads with police brass over the firing of officer Jason Andersen.

Andersen is the cop who shot Fong Lee in 2006. He was exonerated of any wrongdoing by the department, and a civil jury subsequently ruled that Andersen did not use excessive force in shooting Lee. But Andersen was subsequently arrested on a domestic assault charge, which apparently prompted an internal affairs investigation by the MPD and led to his dismissal.

The police federation has made it clear that it’s not happy about Andersen’s firing. Lt. Robert Kroll, vice president of the police union, told the Pioneer Press last month that Andersen was simply a hard-nosed cop doing his job.

“In the current administration, that is not tolerated,” Kroll told the St. Paul daily. “They don’t want big, tough street cops. They feel he got them negative press over Fong Lee, so they’re going to make him pay.”

While the internal-police spat has little to do with whether a Hmong cop is assigned to the 4th Precinct day shift, it might mean that the police federation will be in little mood to compromise over contractual obligations. (Calls to the police union by Minnesota Independent were not returned.)

Despite these hurdles, Wameng Moua, editor of Hmong Today, argues that the city’s leadership can get a Hmong officer assigned to the day shift in the 4th Precinct if it’s truly viewed as a priority. Even a Hmong liaison who is not a sworn law-enforcement officer would be a big improvement, he notes.

“We all know that if anything is a priority they’re going to pursue it despite any budget restraints,” Moua says. “To me it just seems the mayor, the chief, they just don’t see it as a priority to help out a big part of their constituency.”

Samuels hopes that some kind of deal can eventually be brokered.

“I think we have to broach the subject with the police and the union to see if exceptional circumstances could bring about an exceptional compromise,” he says, “because there is significant hardship in the community.”