Community self-policing is the new order of the day.
Via Law Officer:
Traffic stops, suspicious vehicles and suspicious people.
These are the calls categorized as “proactive stops” by police.
5 ABC reports that across the city of Minneapolis, numbers show these stops are way down compared to this time last year.
“You can only assume that the cops are going to be second guessing themselves, should I engage, should I do this or should I not,” said Minneapolis police union president Bob Kroll last November.
He was predicting this drop in proactive stops we’re seeing today as relationships between police and citizens started to strain nationwide and about two weeks before the shooting death of Jamar Clark and the occupation outside the 4th precinct that followed.
“They see people getting in trouble for everything they do,” he said nearly one year ago. “They’re second guessed. They’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t these days.”
Kroll believes the problem has only gotten worse, using the Edina pedestrian stop from last week as an example.
An officer chose to make a self-initiated proactive stop and it ended up online and viewed millions of times.
“It’s very clear that there’s a problem. There’s something going on,” said former California police officer and current consultant David Blake.