Minneapolis/St. Paul

Best Of | Promotions | Store | Ad Index | Advertise With Us | Contact Us

PAGE | 1 | 2 |

 

I.

On Tuesday evening, December 20, the city of Minneapolis anointed 13 new cops during a swearing-in ceremony at the Zurah Shrine Center in south Minneapolis. Those 13 raised the total number of sworn officers on the force to 800—a noteworthy milestone in view of the shrinkage the MPD had faced in recent years owing to state and local budget cuts. It had seen its ranks fall from a high of 930 street cops in 1998 to a low-water mark of 785 at one point in 2005.

The additional cops also counted as partial payment on a campaign pledge Rybak had made during his reelection battle against Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin. From the first mayoral debate back in February onward, McLaughlin hammered Rybak on public safety issues and won the emphatic endorsement of the police union, the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis. By late June, a much-publicized uptick in local murders was giving the charges traction. Rybak, in response, essentially promised more cops now and more cops later, a pledge that included the December 2005 class of 13 and another 60 officers penciled into the 2006 budget.

On its face, it looked like a win-win situation for Rybak and the police chief he appointed in December 2003, Bill McManus—except for one thing: McManus had not wanted job offers to go out to this group in the first place. In an internal MPD e-mail exchange obtained by City Pages, Deputy Chief Don Harris wrote to McManus and other MPD and city officials on September 2, "We just completed the final step in the hiring process for the next class. Final job offers have or will be given to 14 people total." That note went out around noon. At nine o'clock that night, McManus replied: "Gents—I have some concerns with this list. Let's talk before any offers go out. Thanks."

The next e-mail in the group thread is dated October 19, some six weeks later. In it, someone in human resources at the MPD named Bill Champa wrote, "That night, Chief McManus expressed concerns with the diversity of the list.... Final job offers had already gone out."

McManus apparently did not like the fact that the list of hires consisted of one African American, one Latino, one woman, and 11 white men (one of whom eventually dropped out). The chief had promises of his own to keep: Part of the reason he had been hired in the first place was to mend the MPD's terrible reputation in local minority communities, and to stem the tide of police misconduct complaints, lawsuits, and bad press. Toward that end, McManus had reshuffled the department brass to put more African American cops in positions of power and visibility, and he had pledged more officers of color on the street too. McManus refuses to discuss the hiring flap in detail, but concedes that "everyone knows I had an issue with the list." Choosing his words deliberately, he goes on to add that "the mayor didn't give the final directive." Rybak likewise denies forcing the hires.

A lot of people don't buy it. "The mayor made the hires, that's my position," says Ron Edwards, a community activist and longtime critic of the MPD who serves on the Police Community Relations Council, echoing a feeling shared by many observers in the community and the police department. "McManus didn't have nothin' to do with those hires."

One thing that nearly everyone agrees on, however, is that the relationship between the mayor and his most celebrated appointee has hit the rocks. The whispers around City Hall started in earnest during campaign season, when the two were rarely seen together. They got louder when the rift was first mentioned publicly, in a December 12 Star Tribune story that suggested Rybak might not reappoint McManus after his contract expires next year. Both men downplay any ill will between them, but extensive interviews with sources close to the situation—in city government, the MPD, and the community—paint a very different picture.

These sources speak of a growing and sometimes heated rift between the two. As to its origins, they point to differences of personality, background, management style, and priorities, but taken together their accounts trace the story of a mayor who has backed away from the political demands of supporting his reformer police chief, and a chief who has in turn pulled back from his political patron and started to rethink his options. Edwards summarizes the current standoff this way: "You have two men pouting."

In the words of Ian Bethel, a south Minneapolis minister who chairs the Police Community Relations Council, "I think there's an element surrounding McManus in Minneapolis politics saying, 'Hey, we didn't want you to go that far.'" Bethel says that group includes the mayor. "You'd have to go in the backroom with both of them to find out what went wrong," he continues. "But I do think that there was an element of how the mayor sold the job to the chief. McManus played up certain attributes that he had to get the job, naturally. The mayor liked those things—diversity, community [relations], whatnot—and let him know that he'd be able to do this thing when he got in the job. But the chief found different things when he came to town. I think there's a feeling on the chief's side that expectations have not been met."

 

II.

When R.T. Rybak picked William P. McManus to be Minneapolis police chief in December 2003, he had several pressing reasons to bring a reformer to town. Some were political. During the long run-up to his 2001 mayoral victory, Rybak had scored big by outflanking the African American incumbent, Sharon Sayles Belton, on issues of race and the long-troubled MPD. He repeatedly assailed her record on adding more officers of color to the police force, and proclaimed that one of his first priorities, if elected, would be to make the chief more accountable on minority relations.

Beyond the matter of campaign promises, there was a score to settle as well: After winning election, Rybak had turned around and lost his inaugural battle with the old guard at the police department when he stuck his neck out and proposed a buyout of the remainder of then-Chief Robert Olson's contract. The City Council spurned the mayor, voting to keep Olson on the job until his deal expired.

Rybak's other reason for reaching out to a candidate capable of kicking ass and taking names was the state of the department and its public image. In the two years prior to McManus's appointment, the MPD had suffered one high-profile embarrassment after another. In March 2002, officers fatally shot a mentally ill Somali man on Franklin Avenue when he refused to drop the machete he was holding. The outcry over unnecessary force had barely died down in August of that year, when the wounding of an 11-year-old by a stray police bullet during a botched north Minneapolis drug raid led to rioting on surrounding streets that night. The very next day a federal mediator named Patricia Campbell Glenn, who had already been reviewing MPD policies and practices, came to town to tour the wreckage in the Jordan neighborhood. She began a Department of Justice inquiry into the MPD's troubles that led to the eventual formation of the Police Community Relations Council to monitor the department's progress in cleaning up its act.

While all this was still going on, an undercover cop named Duy Ngo was wounded by an assailant in south Minneapolis in the wee hours of February 25, 2003. Ngo called for backup, and other Minneapolis police officers arrived on the scene shortly—where one promptly mistook Ngo for his assailant and shot him several more times (see "Shot to Hell," CP 5/21/03). Ngo nearly died as a result of the multiple gunshots, and by June had filed a civil suit against the city and the department. In fact, lawsuits occasioned by charges of MPD misconduct had been a steady drain on city coffers for years. As CP reported in July of last year ("The Hit Parade Revisited," 7/20), the city of Minneapolis paid out over $9.5 million in claims resulting from MPD actions during the decade from 1995-2004, or nearly a million dollars a year. (In St. Paul, where cumulative stats on police lawsuit payouts only go back to 1998, the seven-year total for '98-'04 came to just over $800,000, representing an average yearly cost to the city of about $100,000—roughly one-tenth of what Minneapolis spends in a typical year.)

Against this backdrop, the last six finalists for the chief's job included three black men (Herman Curry Jr. from Detroit; Joseph Samuels Jr. from Richmond, California; and Montgomery County, Maryland, Sheriff Charles Moose, then a media darling for his role in apprehending the Washington, D.C.-area sniper in 2002); two veteran female cops from the MPD (Deputy Chiefs Sharon Lubinski and Lucy Gerold); and McManus, a former Washington, D.C., assistant chief and more recently the chief of the Dayton, Ohio, PD.

But if McManus was the only white guy on the list, he was also the one with the most vociferous support from minority communities, both back in Dayton and here in Minneapolis. And it was clear to everybody that he wasn't afraid to shake up police business-as-usual, as demonstrated by the vote of no confidence he had received from the Dayton police union following changes he made in that department. Locally, the Black Police Officers Federation and the Coalition of Black Churches announced their endorsement of McManus. (One factor, according to Ron Edwards: Representatives of numerous African American organizations invited each of the out-of-town candidates to breakfast, and only McManus accepted.)

But for all the lip service around City Hall to reforming the MPD, Rybak had to spend a lot of political capital on McManus's hiring. The main source of resistance was the City Council, where Rybak had to line up enough votes to ratify his choice. The majority of council members entered the process favoring one or another of the MPD's three prominent internal candidates (Gerold, Lubiniski, and Tim Dolan, who was already out of the running by the time the finalists' list was narrowed to six), and initially there was some doubt as to whether Rybak could gather the seven votes he needed on the 13-seat council.

The City Council's hometown bias was partly a reflection of the Minneapolis Police Federation's political clout. The cops' union did not want a wild card from outside the department; many of its members still harbored memories of the last crusading police chief to come to town, Tony Bouza, who served as chief from 1980 to 1988, grabbed many headlines in the process, and fought the union tooth and nail much of the time. The day McManus's appointment was announced, union head John Delmonico skipped the event at City Hall. He said the point of his gesture was to register his disapproval to Rybak.

After much lobbying, the City Council approved McManus's appointment by a 9-4 margin on January 16, 2004. Council members Barb Johnson, Gary Schiff, and Scott Benson provided the margin of confirmation when they shifted from no to yes on McManus in the waning days before the vote. It looked like the mayor and the chief were in for a long honeymoon. Reporter Rochelle Olson expressed the prevailing sentiment in the Star Tribune's story about the council vote: "The McManus-Rybak tandem is a core relationship for Minneapolis. Rybak now has what he said he's wanted since he tried to remove Police Chief Robert Olson two years ago—a chief he can agree with and work closely with."

Barely a month later, it all started to go to hell.

 

III.

By the time McManus took office, the Duy Ngo case had become a festering sore in the department's side. Ngo complained bitterly and publicly about the lack of support he received from MPD brass and his fellow officers after nearly being shot to death by one of their own. Nasty rumors about Ngo began circulating around the cop shop in turn. Finally Fox 9 News broadcast one of them in February 2004, reporting that some officers believed Ngo's first wound had been self-inflicted in the interest of avoiding military duty.

On February 25, McManus held a press conference to deny the rumors about Ngo shooting himself. The next day it was reported that McManus had also suspended three senior cops, including chief finalist Lucy Gerold, over allegations of possible impropriety in the department's internal handling of the Ngo shooting investigation. (All three were later reinstated.) A few days later it emerged that there were numerous problems with the investigation, starting with the failure to secure and properly canvass the crime scene on the night Ngo was shot, and the mishandling of a crucial piece of physical evidence (Ngo's bulletproof vest).

The press conference and the suspensions sent a signal that McManus meant to shake up the MPD's status quo, which was ostensibly what he was brought to town to do. The reaction, not surprisingly, was fierce. And while most of the public criticism revolved around the seeming political slap at co-finalist Gerold, McManus was taken to task privately as well. Among the closed-door criticisms, says a well-placed MPD officer we'll call Deep Blue, was a severe dressing-down by a representative of the city attorney's office, who claimed that McManus's words and actions had just increased the city's potential liability in the Ngo case.

"Rybak didn't support the move privately as much as he did publicly," the officer says. "Here was the chief basically admitting that the city was potentially liable in what will probably be the biggest settlement in the city's history. From then on, it was as if the message to Rybak was, 'You better keep tabs on this guy.'

"After that," he continues, "the city attorneys and the council members were all saying, 'This guy is killing us. We're all for a new sheriff in town, but this guy is absolutely killing us.' I know that at that point, Rybak was telling [McManus], 'I need you to talk to these people, I need you to smile more in public meetings.' And McManus was thinking, 'Not only does the mayor not have any backbone, but I gotta play to him and to 13 council members and look happy about it.'"

The incident, Deep Blue adds, "immediately turned the tide against him in the department, right after he got here. I don't know that McManus ever recovered. And remember that Rybak was a glory kid, a novice who beat an incumbent and all that. This was a political lesson for him, too. It was a political punch that said, 'You don't run everything around here.'"

Ron Edwards agrees in retrospect that the division between the two started with the Ngo press conference episode. "I think if you were to look at it chronologically," he says, "that's exactly when it happened. I know that the mayor was enraged by how that played out, with the press and the suspensions and the backlash. Especially where Gerold was concerned, because she was popular with the mayor and his people.

"The thing is, this all caught the chief by surprise. What else was he going to do? He thought he was doing everything he was supposed to. And I think he started noticing then that the situation was not what he had been told it would be. This goes back to a conversation I had with the chief in July of '04, where he talked about meeting the mayor for the first time at a convention they were both at a couple of years earlier. The chief tells the story that they really hit it off, that they were really on the same page philosophically, and had the same approach to things like community policing.

"The chief thought R.T. was a real progressive. But by the time I talked to him in July [2004], he began to realize he had been taken in. The chief would start talking about reform, and the mayor would interrupt. Like it was a charade. This was something different in play than he had been led to believe. The mistake McManus made is that he didn't check out where his guy was at politically. On diversity and race issues, R.T. Rybak is not a progressive, he's not a reformer, he's not a liberal. He doesn't want to get involved in any of this stuff too deeply. When it comes to really fighting social reform issues, he just doesn't have the fight or even the interest. Sometime around mid-'04, McManus started to realize this."

| Next Page>> 

| 1 | 2 |

 

Entire contents ©2006, City Pages LLC, 401 North Third Street, Suite 550, Minneapolis, MN 55401. (612) 375-1015. All rights reserved. No part of this service may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of City Pages LLC except that an individual may download and/or forward articles via e-mail to a reasonable number of recipients for personal, non-commercial purposes.

CITY PAGES: Home | Online & Print Ad Info | Work at City Pages | Contact Us | NEW Privacy Policy

OUR SISTER PAPERS: Village Voice | LA Weekly | Seattle Weekly | OC Weekly | Nashville Scene
  Westword | Broward New Times | Cleveland Scene | Phoenix New Times | The Pitch | SF Weekly
  East Bay Express | Houston Press | Dallas Observer | Miami New Times | River Front Times