Good afternoon, Your Honor, my name is Rebecca Lucero, I am the Commissioner for the Department of Human Rights, the state’s civil rights enforcement agency.

The eyes of the world have been on Minneapolis since the day that Minneapolis Police Department officers murdered Mr. Floyd. And as Assistant Attorney General McKenzie laid out so well, while this was a singular event, the way Minneapolis became the epicenter of the world demonstrates how Mr. Floyd’s murder represents a symptom of a much larger problem.

Today, we come before you, Your Honor, to request that you enter this court order. This agreement, that we are asking the court to enter today, reflects this critically important moment and captures the scope of the necessary work ahead to address race-based policing, a plague on our City that harms everyone, especially people of color and indigenous community members.

I want to thank Your Honor in advance for your role in this important process.

I was asked by Assistant Attorney General McKenzie to share with you the work that the Minnesota Department of Human Rights conducted as it relates to public engagement in Minneapolis and this consent decree. To that end, Your Honor, there are two critical pieces for you to know:

1. This agreement thoughtfully incorporates community and police officer feedback that was vital to the creation of the terms encompassed in this agreement.
   • The first stage of feedback we collected from community members and officers occurred during the investigation itself. This thoughtful and intentional engagement continued after we released our Findings. During the summer of 2022, before beginning the negotiations with the City, Minnesota Department of Human Rights held many meetings and listening events. And on an ongoing basis, I continue to have conversations with community groups regularly– holding space for all the grief, the hopelessness, the hope, the concerns, and answering so many questions.
   • Let me highlight specifically the work that we did over the summer of 2022 to gather extensive feedback from both community members and police officers so that we were prepared to incorporate that feedback as we entered negotiations.
     • Community Members: In partnership with the Minnesota Justice Research Center, we hosted 15 community events last summer, in addition to ongoing conversations with many community organizations and community leaders.
       • The term humanity was a central focus that emerged from these listening sessions. During our conversations, community members shared they want Minneapolis Police Department to move away from a culture of violence to a culture that prioritizes humanity. This includes clear policies that prioritize de-escalation.
       • Accountability: Community members also shared that they want strong systems in place for accountability which are essential to transparency and building trust. 
     • Police Officers: When it came to listening to police officers, we worked with 21 CP Solutions, a group of police practice experts, to hold 15 listening sessions last summer at every precinct with officers of different ranks and assignments.
       • Officers shared repeatedly that they need policies to be clear – that long and confusing policies do not set them up for success. 
       • Officers also shared they want to be trained on those clear policies with hands-on and scenario-based training.
       • And officers shared they need better support – that includes everything from comprehensive health and wellness programs to having technology systems that interface, or talk, to each other.
2. Both community members and police officers stressed how important it is for this Agreement to actually result in meaningful change. That means that there is real intentionality around support and enforcement built into this agreement.
   • While the City and Minneapolis Police Department implement the terms of the court enforceable agreement, multiple entities are responsible both for providing support to the City and Minneapolis Police Department so that they can be successful, and for holding the City and Minneapolis Police Department accountable.
     • Community: The agreement requires the City, Minneapolis Police Department, and the monitoring team to continuously engage in meaningful community engagement with community members. This includes community’s role in asking questions to monitoring team applicants as the City and Minnesota Department of Human Rights select the monitor, to providing feedback to Minneapolis Police Department as Minneapolis Police Department develops and updates its policies, to ongoing engagement with the monitor once that team is ultimately selected.
     • Monitoring Team: I wanted to also address the intentionality we brought to identifying the role of the monitoring team – as is detailed in the Agreement, we designed the scope of the responsibilities for the monitoring team  with the hopes of really setting the City up for success, that means providing on-the-ground technical assistance from policing experts, approving training programs and actually reviewing and attending trainings, providing support to the City and Minneapolis Police Department as they change their accountability systems, and of course monitoring the changes to make sure those changes address race-based policing. The monitoring team must conduct an annual community assessment to see whether and how all the changes are impacting community members. And the monitoring team must provide regular, public reports. All these responsibilities for the monitoring team were set forth in this agreement because all of us – community members, the City, Minneapolis Police Department, Minnesota Department of Human Rights, the court – all of us need the City and Minneapolis Police Department to be wildly successful in strengthening public safety by addressing discriminatory, race-based policing.
     • Team at Minnesota Department of Human Rights: To that end, my team at Minnesota Department of Human Rights is committed to providing timely feedback and support as the City and Minneapolis Police Department transform their accountability systems, rewrite policies, provide training, resources, and support for officers so they can reduce any unnecessary danger that occurs because of discriminatory, race-based policing. The team at Minnesota Department of Human Rights is staffed by deeply dedicated individuals who understood clearly from community members how important it is for the City to make substantial progress.
     • City/Minneapolis Police Department implementation teams: To set the City and Minneapolis Police Department up for success, the Agreement also requires both the City and Minneapolis Police Department to develop implementation teams. These teams are tasked with moving the framework forward that is detailed in the Agreement. As Assistant Attorney General McKenzie noted, this agreement was carefully negotiated with both City and Minneapolis Police Department leaders at the table. This was intentional so that we knew that all the terms we put in this Agreement were achievable and could be reached in a meaningful and timely way. We were careful not to impose an obligation that could not be met – and the implementation teams are intended to successfully move this framework forward.
     • Court: Importantly, you, Your Honor, will oversee this legally binding agreement, and the agreement can only be terminated once the court determines that the City and Minneapolis Police Department have reached full, effective, and sustained compliance with the terms.
       • Why is important that it is a legally binding agreement? The fact that this is legally binding agreement is important because we heard repeatedly from community members about the many efforts that they have seen over the years where the City failed to maintain that coordinated and sustained effort that is truly necessary to effectuate this kind of change. Community members will regularly reference the mediations with the Department of Justice (hereinafter DOJ) from 20+ years ago that the City walked away from, they will reference the many civil settlements after an officer involved incident that required changes to training that did not meaningfully occur, community members will reference the DOJ’s report from after Jamar Clark was killed where the DOJ, for instance, told the City that it was really important to identify any concerning behavior before it resulted in a critical incident and the death of a community member. Here the DOJ specifically talked about the importance of using an Early Intervention System and yet community members and foundations who supported this effort talk about the fact that the City did not stand up a meaningful Early Intervention system to prevent officer involved deaths of community members while grieving for Justine Damond, George Floyd, Amir Locke, Andrew Tekle Sundberg.
     • As you can see, Your Honor, there is a lot of intentionality around enforcement built throughout this agreement to provide the intensive intervention that is necessary to address the seriousness of the problems identified in the Findings.

Your Honor, right before we began negotiating this agreement, I had the honor of meeting with many family members who had a family member killed by a police officer. 

What I heard from them was tremendous grief. And tremendous hope. 

One father who had recently lost his son at the hands of a Minneapolis Police Officer talked about how unbelievably important it is to do the work that we are talking about here today. That if the officer who killed his son had seen his son as someone who was worthy of humanity – that his son was, in fact, a human being, he would still be alive today. 

And despite all his grief, he and many others were spending their time that night with me, encouraging me, encouraging this team, calling on all of us in this room to do everything we can in our power so that the City and Minneapolis Police Department end discriminatory, race-based policing. 

This is a critically important moment for community members, some of whom are in the room today, many of whom have been working on this for years, some for decades, and are eager to see transformational changes for Minneapolis.

I again want to thank you for the critical role you play in this process. 

And I will turn it back over to Assistant Attorney General McKenzie to review some additional information with the Court.