GreeningFrogtownJanFeb18FINAL

More documents

Recommendations

Info

She Wins the Clean Water Prize Frogtowner Lauren Colwell is named Watershed Citizen ofthe Year By Grace Prins Lauren Colwell, a lifelong Frogtown resident, never gave the neighborhood’s water a second thought as she was growing up. That all changed when a college class that involved collecting water samples triggered her interest in protecting water quality in urban areas, including in her home neighborhood. Since receiving a Master’s degree in geology in 201 3, Lauren has spent many hours volunteering to improve Frogtown’s water quality. Her latest effort was a new raingarden installation along the southeast edge of Frogtown Park and Farm on a cold, snowy Saturday morning last October. Frogtown Green’s Tree Frogs, a group of volunteers invested in greening the neighborhood, helped to plant 30 fruit trees for residents and wildlife in collaboration with the St. Paul Forestry department. Lauren, a member of the Tree Frogs, led the planting of a 94-foot-long raingarden near the foot of the sledding hill, to complement the trees. “The raingarden consists of a variety of hardy grasses and pollinator-friendly shrubs and flowers, which were planted in a gently sloping depression to capture and filter rainwater instead of letting it flow into the street,” Lauren explains. Before settlement, Frogtown was a swamp that naturally absorbed a lot of water when it rained. Now, “a significant percent of the neighborhood is paved,” says Lauren. “When rain falls during a thunderstorm or snow melts in the spring, water can’t infiltrate into the ground. Litter and pollution in the water are swept down the street, into the storm sewer system, and directly into the Mississippi River.” LOCAL HEROES Lauren Colwell won the 201 7 Capitol Region Watershed District's Citizen of the Year award. If leaves, dirt, and trash continue to flow down storm drains, in time, clean, drinkable, swimmable, fishable water bodies become polluted and algae-filled. Lauren calculated that if an inch of rain falls during a storm, the newly planted raingarden will take up to 800 gallons of water running off the oneacre hillside, and will prevent the water from entering storm sewers, causing flooding, and degrading water quality. “In addition to capturing stormwater, this raingarden will also benefit pollinators like bees and butterflies,” Lauren adds. “Before planting the raingarden, I collected plants from neighbors and other Master Water Stewards and watched the plants grow in my yard over the summer. Many days, I’d find the backyard covered in monarch butterflies!” Lauren, who works as an environmental consultant, learned about raingarden planning and installation as part of her Master Water Steward training with the Capitol Region Watershed District (CRWD). She was interested in the program as a way to engage and educate her community about water and environmental issues. Lauren encourages Frogtown residents who are interested in natural resources and volunteer opportunities to consider becoming a Master Water Steward. CRWD also offers funding and free resources to residents who want to plant a raingarden of their own at their house, boulevard, or church property (more information at capitolregionwd.org). Frogtowners interested in helping to plant future raingardens or maintain the Frogtown Park raingarden can contact Frogtown Green at 651 -757-5970 or jessica@capitolregionwd.org. Other simple actions, such as keeping leaves and trash from clogging your closest storm drain or controlling the amount of salt on sidewalks in the winter, can make a big difference in protecting the quality of nearby lakes and rivers, Lauren adds. The Unlikely Man with a Badge Nephew slain by police, Frogtowner Clarence Castile joins Police Reserve Clarence Castile is a forward-looking guy. He likes to think about the future, and his head is abuzz with optimistic plans for himself and his loved ones. Which is a little surprising, because if anyone could be expected to want to dwell on the past, it’s Clarence. He’s the uncle of Philando Castile, whose 201 6 murder by a terrified young police officer brought Minnesotan’s outrage about police behavior to a brutal climax. Reliving Philando Castile’s dying moments— broadcast live by his girlfriend on Facebook and then scrutinized endlessly by media and in court—could have turned a less optimistic man bitter, and hopeless. Instead, six months after St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted on all charges in Philando Castile’s death, Philando’s uncle spends several hours a week sitting in a police car, in uniform, wearing a badge. He takes dozens of hours off his busy landscaping and catering businesses to sit in a room full of police officers, making recommendations about their future training. As a newly sworn-in officer in St. Paul’s 80 member police reserve, and one of five civilians on the state’s 1 5-member Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) board, Castile is convinced he can “take negative energy and history and turn it into something positive.” Not that he’s forgotten the injustice that attended his nephew’s death. Not at all. He still remembers driving desperately down Larpenteur Avenue the night Philando was killed, searching for his nephew’s car, “just about having a heart attack trying to find him before it was too late.” He’s still furious about the verdict, believing fervently that Yanez was guilty. It’s just that he knows he can’t change the past, so he’s focusing on the future. He’s thrilled about Melvin Carter’s mayoral victory, and believes that many more young black men and women should become St Paul’s leaders. ”We need more black mayors, more black governors, more black teachers. And I want to be the catalyst for more black children to think about becoming police officers. Why shouldn’t they?” he asks. “Then, if a friend or a brother or an uncle gets arrested, you get to make damn sure they will be treated with dignity. And you can set an example, and let your fellow officers see how you treat people with dignity.” Police reserve work gets Castile out into neighborhoods, doing outreach work like directing traffic, checking on houses whose residents are out of town, “lighting up alleys” to bring frightened neighbors a sense of security. He believes strongly in the reserve program as a pathway for women and people of color to enter the police force. Reserve officers get to see first-hand what police work involves. “You get to meet cops, learn about procedures, how to do reports, what the work is really like,” he says. As a POST board member, Castile says he is looking forward to bringing the input of someone who has, in his words, “suffered at the hands of law enforcement.” The statewide board is charged with setting standards for required training and continuing education for all Minnesota police officers. Beginning July 1 , 201 8, that will include crisis intervention, conflict management and “recognizing and valuing community diversity and cultural differences to include implicit bias,” according to legislation passed last year. Castile believes that the latter training must be delivered by people with the right expertise. “I realize that the police Clarence Castile. want to be trained by police,” he says, “and when it comes to how to use a gun or how to break down a door, that makes sense, they’re the experts. But when we’re talking about diversity, or different ethnic backgrounds, with respectful treatment, then we’re the experts. And in the future, we will be heard.” PAGE 10 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018
WHAT WORKS Is This the Way to Quell Gun Violence? Metro State Criminologist James Densley describes a program that's worked across the country As shootouts go, the November 30 burst of gunfire around Milton and Edmund ended about as well as you could hope. Nobody dead. Nobody wounded. The harm was to innocent neighbors — people who want to believe that they and their loved ones are safe in their homes. A young woman who had a bullet crash through a chair in her living room said later that her feelings were still too raw to talk about it. Other neighbors took to Facebook to say that they had had it. Come spring they were moving out. St. Paul police say there’s been a surge of gun violence, not only here but across the country. And according to their statistics, portions of Frogtown lead the city in the reported number of shots fired. To anyone who wants a safe, quiet life for themselves and their family, here’s the obvious question: what can be done to quell gun violence? As it turns out, there are methods that are proven to work. Recently James Densley, a Metro State University criminologist, described a model that has reliably cut gun violence in cities across the country. Described as the “pulling levers” strategy, it starts with the understanding that a small number of people are responsible for a large share of a city’s violence. A Boston study showed that five percent of the population accounted for 85 percent of non-fatal gunshot injuries. In Chicago, about 75 percent of gun crime victims were confined to six percent of the population. “So the first part of the strategy,” says Densley, “is you identify who is most at risk and who are the most prolific offenders. The vast majority of people in neighborhoods with bad reputations are law-abiding, perfectly happy community members. There’s just a tiny, tiny, tiny group of people who are responsible for violence.” Unlike the “broken windows” approach to policing, where cops crack down on everything and, in the process, frequently alienate just about everybody, the pulling levers method uses front-end research to identify who is most likely to be a victim or perpetrator of gun violence. Step two goes like this, says Densley: “Police target those individuals. They conduct an enforcement activity that might include raids, arrest warrants. It’s a show of force. That opens up the possibility of the next and most important part of the strategy, which is to bring the most highprofile offenders in for a sit-down meeting.” That meeting is typically held in a place of significance within the community. It might be a church, a rec center, or a library. Attending are local police, prosecutors, and possibly officials from federal drug enforcement, the FBI, or Metro State criminologist James Densley. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. But also included are community members, ministers, social workers, substance abuse counselors, educators and trainers. The message at this meeting is, we know who you are. If you need help to break out of a cycle of violence, here it is. If you don’t, we’ll pull every legal lever at our disposal to bring you down. The role of the community in this process is critical, says Densley. “The moms, the dads, the community members, they become the moral voice. They deliver the message that enough is enough, the violence has to stop. We are not complicit in this any longer.” The final step is monitoring to make sure that the people caught in this net get the help or the consequences they were promised. It’s not a panacea, Densley admits. Gun violence doesn’t end overnight. But in peer-reviewed studies, these programs have cut shootings by 20 to 40 percent in Cincinnati, Chicago, Indianapolis, Boston and Stockton, CA. So why don’t St. Paul police try this approach here? The fact is, they have, albeit with mixed results. Around 201 2, local police watched with increasing alarm as Latino gang feuds gathered intensity. Paul Iovino, now deputy chief but then commander of the gang unit, unintentionally followed the script outlined in the pulling levers strategy. His crew got warrants for about 20 of the most at-risk offenders. While executing the warrants, they delivered a letter to parents in the home, stating that their children were involved with gangs and criminal activity. The letter urged family members to come to a meeting at Neighborhood House, where police, city attorneys, park and rec and school officials, a rep from the Mexican consulate and others laid out a plan to offer help and get a lid on violence. By Iovino’s account, it worked. About 70 people showed up. “Moms, dads, siblings, grandparents,” Iovino recalled. The result: “The rhetoric between the two gangs fell off. The rival gang and the gang we targeted went to sleep. It was a wonderful lesson for us.” But when police attempted another version of this program this fall along Snelling Ave. in the wake of shootings and other mayhem, it flopped. Cops showed up with a similar batch of law enforcement and social workers for a meeting in a Sherburne Ave. church basement. They had food for a mob. Nobody showed up. “We were literally going out into the street, grabbing people and saying, hey, do you want a free warm meal?” Iovino says. What went wrong? Iovino and Sgt. Mike Carsten speculated later there might be differences between the family structures in the group they were targeting. “What works on the West Side might not work in Frogtown,” said Carsten. What if you take a critical, communitycentric eye to this approach? When we asked Community Action Programs educator and organizer Damon Drake for his analysis, he said that there wasn’t a need for a heavy-handed enforcement drive with warrants and arrests on the front end. “The people you’re targeting don’t need the stick. Everybody knows the stick. The easiest thing in the world is catching these guys doing something wrong.” Instead, he said, the problem is poverty, lack of life skills in conflict management and negotiation, role models, and opportunity that leads to living-wage work and stability. Reform, he said, isn’t so easily led by police, because of widespread lack of trust of cops within the community. And changes in a kid aren’t so easily accomplished if the home and neighborhood he goes back to aren’t bought into the straight-laced life. “It’s hard to talk about conflict resolution with your mom if she’s drinking a 40 and watching a soap opera and then yelling at you about why are you talking that social worker stuff.” The real problem, year after year, said Drake, is finding a version of the carrot — education, dignified work, living wages, stable housing and opportunity — that is truly delivered to people who need a boost to change their lives. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 PAGE 11
Page 1 and 2: JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 Inside… Gre
Page 3 and 4: FROGTOWN NEWS Manager Simona Zappas
Page 5 and 6: For County Board Seat, the Race Is
Page 8 and 9: Training, Continued showing me how
Page 12: PAGE 12 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018

GreeningFrogtownJanFeb18FINAL

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?