It's been four years since I first called for radical, systemic change in Minnesota law enforcement in this forum. George Floyd's horrific death in police custody shows little has changed.
I'm calling again to overhaul policing in Minnesota, starting with the state's Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST), a toothless tiger. As this paper showed in 2017, hundreds of Minnesota peace officers have been convicted of criminal offenses, but most were never disciplined by the state because the POST Board, by design, has little say in such matters, and no say whatsoever when it comes to good-old-fashioned police misconduct.
No truly independent office of police accountability exists in Minnesota. We need one. The POST Board is flush with cops. Individual agencies investigate themselves and individual chiefs discipline (or not) their officers. There are more than 400 agencies in the state and no standardization. That's 400 different ways of doing things. Four hundred internal policies governing police use of force. Four hundred ways to reshuffle the deck and transfer rogue cops, regardless of their rap sheet. And when 80% of those agencies have 25 employees or fewer, police are very much policing themselves.
The POST Board's primary duty is licensing and training, but here, too, it falls short. The POST Board sets pre-service learning objectives, but refuses to disclose which programs deliver them best, even when most programs are housed in higher-education institutions paid for by Minnesota tax dollars. There's no league table or seal of approval, even though quality is variable and some programs are markedly better than others.
What many Minnesotans don't realize is pre-service training for police is the purview of colleges and universities, not police academies. This is unique to Minnesota and on its face it makes sense (Minnesota's cops are very well credentialed). But Minnesota's colleges and universities are so badly underfunded that future cops are training on antiquated equipment. They also are training on antiquated ideas — POST learning objectives skewed heavily toward technical skills and in some cases, irrelevant.
Take "excited delirium," a diagnosis not recognized by the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association nor World Health Organization, yet somehow still endorsed by POST. The criminal complaint against Derek Chauvin in connection with Floyd's death states that Officer Thomas Lane was "worried about excited delirium or whatever." I'm worried about it, too, but for different reasons — the fact that outdated learning objectives are disproportionately taught by outdated rank-and-file cops, long retired and far removed both from the field and evidence-based policing.
Tuition dollars bridge the funding gap in Minnesota's police education programs, the net result being programs that are not nearly as selective as they should be when admitting aspiring cops. There is little prospective screening, which explains why bad apples are always replenished. Students also pay for their classes out of pocket, which dissuades good apples who are low-income or thinking about changing careers from entering the profession and shaking the tree. The system is designed to repopulate in its own image.
After cops get licensed, the POST Board oversees all in-service training requirements, but again decisions about who gets trained and how is devolved to the agency level. Small agencies can't afford quality training or to send their officers away to receive it. Large agencies rely on train-the-trainer models that get lost in translation. And the POST Broad tracks neither in detail, even though the agency level is where the problems in policing are magnified.
