Ward Eleven Conversation on Community Safety and Community Care

We – Ward Eleven Allied Voices for Equity (WEAVE) – are a group of your fellow neighbors who deeply care about public safety and ensuring we create a broader Minneapolis community that cares for, protects and keeps each other safe. We have attended the first two of Councilmember Koski’s public safety forums and do not believe they have met the needs of this community. They have focused almost wholly on police response to community issues and have offered minimal opportunity for neighbors to be in dialogue. Even when focusing on police response, there has been no acknowledgment or discussion about how the Minneapolis Police Department is addressing the findings of the Minnesota Department of Human Rights – who found MPD has exhibited a pattern and practice of race discrimination.

There is real harm going on in our city and communities across our state and country. We believe we have an obligation to dig deeper to understand the root causes of violence, evaluate what solutions truly address victims’ needs and determine how to build a community that is more resilient and can interrupt or stop violence before it starts. We believe we have to do this work together, with community members and community groups most impacted by violence, and think broadly about what would deliver real public safety in our city. This requires not getting stuck in a mindset of fear – though we acknowledge the reality of the impacts of violence in our homes and communities – so that we have a brave space to discuss how we can work together to build the community supports needed to ensure each and every one of us and our neighbors is cared for and kept safe.

With that aim, we would like to invite you to a different kind of public safety conversation at Pearl Park Community Center, on Wednesday, February 08, 2023 at 7 pm. Whatever your experiences and current views on public safety are, we welcome your voice and perspective at this conversation. We all deserve to be heard, so that we can learn from one another and find the common values that should guide our thinking and action around public safety. We will have a few speakers to help us expand and frame our discussion (and likely a few elected leaders) and then we will be talking as a community. Because it’s going to take all of us to find the path forward.

We hope you will join and invite your friends and neighbors.

Host or Publisher Ward Eleven Allied Voices for Equity (WEAVE)