SERIES: Creating Authentic Safety in Minnesota

Stories that reflect the challenges and solutions to creating a safer Minnesota that relies less on locks than on addressing behavioral concerns and needs.

If you want to be part of discussions about action steps that re-imagine public safety with people around the state, please sign up here. Those discussions will happen in Greater Minnesota this summer, followed by collective online conversations.



Amity Dimick story here

In her testimony to the UN delegation, Dimick said she asks for qualified immunity to not be a baseline for officers. Accountants and doctors are held responsible when they make a mistake, she says. “How did the police convince us that they are beyond reproach?”


House Discussion About No-Knock Warrants, Bias Registry, and More

“Two mosques have been burned in the last 48 hours in Minnesota. They are the target of hate and bigotry, and we’re sitting here pretending that there is no problem.” 


Hmong Minnesotan Efforts to Liberate Us From Violence

“Events like these will continue to happen if the community, including Hmong Americans, continue to dismiss cases related to police brutality and domestic violence as individual stand-alone incidents.” 


Breaking the Cycles that Lead to Violence

“In the 1990s, a group of people traveled to the Yukon to be trained in peacemaking circles. They took what they learned and brought it back to Minnesota. I’ve learned from these traditions that mistakes are learning opportunities and that individuals might have done the action, but ultimately it’s about involving family and community in solutions.”


Deep Dive: Let’s Talk About Public Safety

“The police are not the end-all of our public safety system. We need to be investing in more comprehensive programs, like our mental health programs. We need to be thinking of how we’re [developing] comprehensive solutions for vulnerable community members. We need to be demanding of city leadership to not invest more into a broken system.”


Deneal Trueblood-Lynch (photo by Sarah Whiting)

Deep Dive: Why Doesn’t Minnesota Have a Survivors Justice Act?

“While I was there, this question — even to this day — comes to the surface: How can incarcerating me solve or cure that old childhood trauma? Now I’m adding the trauma of being incarcerated on top of that trauma … and having to deal with the stress of my daughter’s trauma. There were no doctors in there I could talk to, to start to unpack the situation.”


Rudimentary Vignettes: Public Safety

“You don’t shoot a child in the head because he rang your doorbell. The fact that the police said it was an ‘error’ is why America is the way it is.”