POLICE AT WORK
Accidents, misconduct, but much improvement
I concur with almost everything in the Aug. 19 editorial entitled "The troubling arrest of Derryl Jenkins." I share the concerns regarding Minneapolis police training and reporting on this incident, and I have taken recent actions in those areas. However, there is one statistic I need to correct. The city of Minneapolis has not paid over $14 million in police misconduct claims since 2000. The amount for police misconduct claims is actually much lower.
The city owns the responsibility for the reporting error. A graph on the city's website entitled "Police -- Total Liability Payouts" shows that some major settlements, such as the $4.5 million for Duy Ngo, were labeled "Police Misconduct." The reality is that some of these cases were terrible accidents not due to any misconduct by police officers. I know, just off the top of my head, of over $7 million in settlements in the last five years for unfortunate accidents. There are likely more.
In the realities of police work, accidents do happen. Police are driving vehicles, sometimes at high rates of speed to respond to emergencies and calls. We are dealing with dangerous situations in which officers have only an instant to make decisions. We also have incidents of misconduct. I think we have been making great strides to reduce liabilities and injuries in both categories, and I know our liability payments for misconduct have gone down steadily during my tenure as chief.
We will make sure the city corrects the website, and the Minneapolis Police Department will continue to work hard to "Protect with Courage and Serve with Compassion."
POLICE CHIEF TIMOTHY J. DOLAN,
MINNEAPOLIS
Health care in America
Look around -- it's possible to do a lot better
An Aug. 15 letter writer appears to be a doctor without the ability to see the cure in front of him. He states it is mathematically impossible to do more for people at less cost. Yet he ignores these facts: Every other industrialized country in the world is doing more at a lower cost. The United States ranks 37th in a World Health Organization ranking of overall health care (just behind Costa Rica and just ahead of Slovenia). The United States ranks dead last among industrialized countries in the treatment of preventable diseases.
By improving the treatment of preventable diseases we can lower our costs by helping people before they end up in the emergency room with advanced stages of sickness and disease. Our neighbors to the north, who spend just over half of what we do for health care (per capita), have overwhelmingly declared in a recent survey that they would not be willing to trade their health care for the system (or lack thereof) we have in the United States.
