IAPE Evidence Blog

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BYLINE: Ed Felien
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Hen­nepin County, MN

The con­tro­versy sur­round­ing the Metro Gang Strike Force (MGSF) will not go away.

Hen­nepin County Attor­ney Mike Free­man decided there was not enough evi­dence to bring crim­i­nal charges against mem­bers of the Strike Force. There were three areas where there could have been crim­i­nal mis­con­duct: theft and other related offenses; mis­con­duct by a pub­lic offi­cer; and fail­ure to pro­tect prop­erty and data.

Per­haps the most con­tro­ver­sial aspect of the charge of theft against the MGSF is the claim that they seized prop­erty with­out a valid law enforce­ment purpose.

Accord­ing to Freeman’s report: “Inves­ti­ga­tors also found a num­ber of cases where some doc­u­men­ta­tion was miss­ing con­cern­ing for­fei­ture of seized cash. This is con­sis­tent with the Leg­isla­tive Auditor’s Report which says: ‘The strike force did not have doc­u­men­ta­tion to show that it served seizure notices for 202 of 545 cash seizures we tested, total­ing about $165,650. By not serv­ing the required notice of seizure, the strike force vio­lated the statu­tory admin­is­tra­tive for­fei­ture process and may not have a legal right to retain the seized cash.’”

It is impor­tant to note that the above cash was deposited in the MGSF evi­dence room and even­tu­ally in an MGSF bank account. There is no evi­dence that MGSF offi­cers took cash from sus­pects for their per­sonal use.

The Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union is very crit­i­cal of Freeman’s deci­sion not to pros­e­cute mem­bers of the MGSF. In their state­ment they say they oppose “the power of law enforce­ment to seize and for­feit prop­erty with­out crim­i­nal charges. This power, known as admin­is­tra­tive for­fei­ture, gives police the power to decide guilt and pun­ish­ment. Under admin­is­tra­tive for­fei­ture, the prop­erty owner must pay to sue to have their prop­erty returned, and the police do not need to charge or even arrest some­one to pun­ish them with forfeiture.”

Freeman’s crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion looked into claims that MGSF employ­ees took and used prop­erty from the evi­dence room, but these reports could not be sub­stan­ti­ated. Some prop­erty that was taken by employ­ees was alleged to have been marked for destruc­tion and was per­mit­ted by the com­man­der to be con­verted to the per­sonal use of employ­ees, but the com­man­der refused to speak with inves­ti­ga­tors regard­ing these claims. As a result there was insuf­fi­cient evi­dence to sup­port crim­i­nal charges.

The Spe­cial Review Panel begun by Min­nesota Commiss-ioner of Pub­lic Safety Michael Cam­pion found that “offi­cers stated that they used lap­tops removed from the evi­dence room for offi­cial pur­poses.” But Free­man con­cludes “absent proof that spe­cific com­put­ers were con­verted to per­sonal use, there is insuf­fi­cient evi­dence that any of the employ­ees ‘took’ the prop­erty as required by the inter­fer­ence with prop­erty in offi­cial cus­tody statute 609.47.”

An ice auger was seized as part of a nar­cotics case. It went miss­ing from the evi­dence room. The case offi­cer let it be known he was look­ing for the auger, and then the auger mys­te­ri­ously reap­peared. Twenty watches dis­ap­peared and never reappeared.

Many seized items were sold to MGSF mem­bers or their fam­i­lies. A pair of trail­ers were sold to the commander’s son. They were located on the commander’s vaca­tion prop­erty in north­ern Min­nesota. One was a 7-foot by 9-foot flatbed trailer that cost $1,300 in 2005 when it was bought from Gan­der Moun­tain. The son paid $500 for it. Free­man con­cludes: “There is insuf­fi­cient evi­dence that the prices paid were so far below the mar­ket value for these used trail­ers that the trans­ac­tion could be deemed a swin­dle of the MGSF.”

There was cer­tainly sloppy book­keep­ing. Free­man and the leg­isla­tive audi­tor agree “that the state of the records and the lack of inter­nal con­trols made it impos­si­ble for us to con­clude that all seized cash was either held in the prop­erty room or deposited with the fis­cal agent.” The com­man­der said he recalled pay­ing a MGSF worker $5,000 as an advance until they could be put on the Ram­sey County pay­roll, and he used money to pay con­fi­den­tial informants.

Some money was also used for travel. Free­man con­cludes, once again, there are insuf­fi­cient grounds for pros­e­cu­tion of crim­i­nal wrong­do­ing. How­ever, on Wednes­day, Aug. 25, 2010, a fed­eral court awarded $3 mil­lion in a class action law­suit to vic­tims of abuse by offi­cers of the MGSF. Accord­ing to Mara Got­tfried in her piece in the Pio­neer Press, Thurs­day, Aug. 26, the Fed­eral Dis­trict Court ruled that some MGSF offi­cers would stop peo­ple not sus­pected of gang activ­ity and seize their money. A Strike Force Review panel found “These encoun­ters almost always involved a per­son of color.”

The law­suit also claimed that strike force mem­bers “engaged in a pat­tern and prac­tice of using their appar­ent author­ity as police offi­cers to extort cash and prop­erty … par­tic­u­larly from those con­cerned about their immi­gra­tion sta­tus who would nat­u­rally per­ceive that they had no abil­ity to assert legal rights.” One of the attor­neys for the vic­tims said, “Every­body was failed here in the Twin Cities, every­body had a loss here. The Con­sti­tu­tion didn’t work for all of us when this rogue task force was run amok out there, vio­lat­ing people’s rights. … This is an ugly chap­ter, I’m sorry to say, in the life of the Twin Cities. But it ends pos­i­tively, it ends on a good note.”

Once again, the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem can­not act because dis­trict attor­neys believe they can­not prove guilt beyond a rea­son­able doubt, and civil courts have issued a $3 mil­lion set­tle­ment based on a pre­pon­der­ance of evi­dence. And the offi­cers respon­si­ble for this bleed­ing of the pub­lic trea­sury con­tinue to be paid by the City of Min­neapo­lis and other juris­dic­tions that were part of the now defunct MGSF.

Freeman’s report con­tin­ues: “On May 20, 2009, the day MGSF oper­a­tions were sus­pended; sev­eral MGSF offi­cers were seen shred­ding doc­u­ments.” “The Offi­cial Records Act requires pub­lic offi­cers to ‘make and pre­serve all records nec­es­sary to a full and accu­rate knowl­edge of their offi­cial activ­i­ties.’ ” But, once again, with­out direct evi­dence that the offi­cers were delib­er­ately try­ing to destroy evi­dence that would impli­cate them in a crime, there is not suf­fi­cient evi­dence to bring crim­i­nal charges. The offi­cers claimed they were told by their home depart­ments to “clean out their files,” and they needed to destroy files to pro­tect under­cover offi­cers and informants.

The MGSF has dis­banded. The com­man­der has retired after 40 years as a St. Paul police officer.

Charles Samuel­son, the direc­tor of the ACLU-MN, wants Free­man to con­vene a Grand Jury to hear evi­dence and deter­mine if crimes have been com­mit­ted and whether offi­cers should be indicted: “The County Attor­ney has shown there is no pun­ish­ment for abuse of for­fei­ture power. We are shocked that he would make this deci­sion with­out input from the pub­lic. Again, we urge him to call for a grand jury inves­ti­ga­tion, and let the com­mu­nity decide whether any crimes were com­mit­ted.” Randy Hop­per, the attor­ney who won the $3 mil­lion set­tle­ment in Fed­eral Dis­trict Court against the MGSF, wants the Min­nesota Attor­ney Gen­eral to inves­ti­gate, because he believes the Hen­nepin County Attor­ney works too closely with the offi­cers and has a con­flict of interest.

In all prob­a­bil­ity, the mat­ter will sim­ply rest, and the events will fade into mem­ory.
One of the last actions of the MGSF was to clean out the Rolling 30’s gang from South Min­neapo­lis. They got con­vic­tions for more than a dozen gang mem­bers and made a major con­tri­bu­tion to peace and quiet in the Pow­der­horn and Cen­tral neigh­bor­hoods of South Minneapolis.

When Offi­cer Jerry Haaf was mur­dered by the Vice Lords almost 20 years ago, the police put tremen­dous pres­sure on the African-American com­mu­nity in South Min­neapo­lis to the point that Mayor Sharon Bel­ton pub­licly called for restraint. But they got one of the shoot­ers to con­fess and tes­tify against the oth­ers, and, even­tu­ally, they elim­i­nated the Vice Lords as a scourge to South Min­neapo­lis.
It must be that every cop wants to be Clint East­wood as Dirty Harry or Charles Bron­son in Death Wish. The abuses of power by the MGSF were an exam­ple of that kind of Hol­ly­wood vig­i­lante jus­tice. If we believe in the rule of law, if we believe in equal rights for all our cit­i­zens, then we have to move beyond this kind of thuggery.

Clearly, we need a bet­ter way to deal with the social prob­lems in our com­mu­nity, but until we find a way that we can all agree on, we’ll still need some­one to take out the garbage, and when they do, they’ll get their hands dirty.

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org