guy i am president of the pain failon district high planning council and i'm extremely pleased that all of you are here tonight about such a serious topic i do want you to know that the most recent incident happened a couple of blocks from my house so this is not like an issue that is known to me first off i would like  remember the family and and others who have experienced harm so i would like us to take a moment of silence if prayer is your thing send a prayer to the  thank you all very much now i would like to introduce our host for the evening the pastor of the church here roger  thank you well and welcome everyone i'm roger allman dinger i've been pastor here about six years we meet here often and i think that's a good thing we're glad to have you here it is a large and complicated building we host the literacy councils open door learning center there's four very diverse congregations that worship in our space alley shop is a free store offered out here in the pain maryland partnership  s housed here and it's transition center i should make some introductions of people who are here city council members i notice dan bostrom is here members we have county commissioners here which of our county commissioners are here jim mcdonald is here anyone else raphael ortega's here thank you for being here we have our county attorney john toy on stage we have some legislators here i saw tim mahoney tim can you wave have you seen other legislators  we have received regrets from a number of our elected officials our representative lashon senator marty i have sent in their regrets and with that i think i want to proceed in true introducing the mayor we are extremely fortunate to have the mayor who is present with us this evening he has demonstrated concern for this issue and i'd like to turn the time now over to him  speak in terms of making his comments and here we are coming thanks thanks everybody for coming out tonight this is an incredibly powerful statement about a community that cares a community that wants better for our neighborhood here a community that is just concerned about what is happening on the streets of the side of the city of st paul we did have an opportunity to just remember the victim of this last week's senseless act of violence but i also want to remember everyone that has been a victim of violence particularly last year there have been a lot of our children our brothers our sisters of all races of all ages that have been victims of crimes and we need to remember that this isn't about one incident this is about a series of behavior this is about acts that we will not tolerate in our community this is about acts that no community should tolerate it is really hard when you've invested your life into a community when you've raised your family in a community bought a house gone to school open up a business tended to your gone to church in this community to see the things that we have seen particularly over the last couple months happening in the streets of these side and i can sit here and tell you all day long about how statistically things are better than they have been but there is no statistic that will comfort you when you have been a victim of a crime when your loved one has been a victim of a crime when you have witnessed some of the acts that are occurring in the streets what you need to know is that we stand together on all this you have the top leadership of the city of st paul here not just elected officials that feel like they have to be here but we have our department heads that are working in conjunction with all other folks in the community to say what do we need to do differently what do we need to do better how do we make sure that these things don't get repeat it how do we make sure that there's not another victim of a sense of speeding how do we make sure that there's not another child laid to rest too early because of gun violence in our streets when we come together we can address these issues they're not easy but there are a lot of us and a lot of you that have worked for years to strengthen the side to build it up whether you've been on the district council or you've been as part of a church group whether you've tutored or mentored a child read to a child help somebody along whether you just shop along the avenues here all of those things add up to people that are invested in a community and when people are invested in a community we can change what's happening out there you're going to hear a lot from the chief and from the county attorney about some of the strategies that we have employed and deployed over the last couple of weeks but you need to understand this is not something new this is not a reaction to what we saw last friday on the fourth of july or during the course of the summer this is a part of a long term pattern of trying to figure out how we get ahead of the curve on some of these youth that are committing these crimes some of these gang bangers that are running around on the street causing trouble and taking innocent people along with them the chief has worked very hard with his officers using the best techniques he can and but sometimes they're running from one call to another to another and it's hard to stay ahead of that curve sometimes but what gives i know the chief strength what gives me strength is looking at some of the community work and some of the community groups that are out there the youth in transitions program trying to get kids steered out of gangs and into the right direction an incredibly powerful program working side by side with our with our folks in ramsey county working in our libraries working in our in our in our parks and rec building it's not a coincidence that we're standing one hundred yards or sitting one hundred yards away from a new building that's rising up on the east side as a testament to a city that cares about all of its communities as a testament to a city that says we are a city of neighborhoods and all of our neighborhoods have to be strong all of our neighborhoods have to be safe i can't say it's ok to have it be nice and strong and safe over in highland park but say that doesn't matter because on the east side things are falling apart i know what this is like i lived in frogtown for eight years and i had summers where it was nice and your neighbors got together and you could walk down the street and feel like you are really part of a community and there were other summers where one family moved onto the block and he was selling drugs or run and kind of wild and it totally changed how we felt about that community totally changed how safe we felt in our own home i've heard those gunshots at night i've seen victims lying on the street i've been a victim of crime and it does not feel good and it doesn't want to make make you want to invest in that community we don't have it right obviously last summer we had a lot of success we weren't perfect then either but we didn't see some of the incidents that we had what we're seeing the last few weeks in the paint last few months in the city is troubling it's very concerning and we know we need to do more i worked with the chief and with the county attorney with our city attorney to say let's invest more resources immediately on the east side let's have more officers patrolling the site immediately let's flood the east side and let's make sure that this end but let's take this moment as a community to unite and to redouble our efforts let's not separate there are a lot of good people in this room that care about this community we're all races we're all ages some of us are new to the city of st paul some of us have been here for generations our strength this in uniting not dividing so as tonight it's our opportunity here for me a little bit and i'm going to apologize because i'm going to leave in a in a little while i have some other commitments but i will be here for a while and i do want to hear from you and i want to just say to you that we every member of this community every member of my leadership team every member of the police department is committed to making the eight east side and frog and the north end and the west side in every part of the city a great place to live to raise your family and to be a part of a community look around you look at the strength of this room let's walk out of this room united and committed to making sure that we fight to make the same city st paul as strong of a neighborhood as any other community in the state we can do it thank you thank you to the mayor for that griffith address we're going to be spending most of our time i hope you know getting questions from you and getting some answers so we're going to be getting to that shortly first though i want to call up chief com smith he's going to provide a very brief overview of the wood strand case and he's going to tell us what the community can expect of the police and how we can all be a part of the solution so chief thank you well and thank you for everybody being here tonight this is a testament of why i live in st paul thank you because people care no i'm going to give you a briefing of what happened in the last couple of incidents not just mr wickstrom because there's been troubling incidents with what we call it's kind of a national trend with flash mobs but i want to tell you one thing regardless how we look regardless where we worship regardless what our race ethnicity or anything else and this is a community issue this is not about race i want to i want to make that clear note people have some questions and we've got all sorts of experts tonight even i've brought a bunch of people from the police department that will be able to answer even more specific questions when you have them but i want to let you know that we are working we did a lot of good things last year on the east side and we have some really good partnerships that we've continued to do and you get three or four or five incidents of large groups of i can say thuggish behavior and that can ruin everything that we've done and i'm not going to have it i'm going to tell you that we are going to put the resources you hear about that in a second but we've done a bunch of great things and partnerships last year we started a new program it was called intel led community partnership community prosecution and community policing and guess what it worked we had very few incidents like this of large groups of individuals that come together at a moment's notice we don't know when technology is a good thing in a bad thing where you can get forty people who show up on  street corner because they use a device like this to tweet or whatever they use and to show up by the way i'm asking parents out here that's one thing that i'm going to ask you to make sure that you look at the media tools or social media tools that your children use if you get one thing for me tonight it does make a difference by the way that's a proactive thing of us working together so we had a great year last year we partner with one hundred eighty degrees a nice gardels run in fact we have thirty young men that were part of some large groups last year that we came in contact with partnered with the county attorney youth in transition  save our sons and they're still in that program this year so they're not out in the street causing trouble so i know we can do things that work on the prevention side but make no doubt about it i live in st paul the guy they used to call before  chief when there were problems like this for the two chiefs that i work for we will not allow this behavior to happen on the east side we've put a lot of resources here on the east side right now and none of you i don't expect any of you whether you live in any part of the city to have to take on or to put up with this type of behavior and i understand it so now let me tell you a little bit about the two cases you know first in july when a young seventeen year old african american male killed by another young seventeen year old have going to merican male after we had a fight just blocks from here a forty to sixty people that my officers had to go into we stop the original salt arrested a couple people some of that group came back and that young man was tragically killed by gunfire should have happened now you police department made an arrest right away and we have that suspect the suspects been charged we work very closely with all our county partners here mr weeks from terrible situation we already have an individual or a group of individuals that are fighting in the street they came out of a house there is forty to fifty people fighting and he is brutally beat i think all of you have read about most of the details in the paper i'm not going to reiterate that so there's already a fight in the street and this individual then is severely beaten beaten and we all pray for his recovery it's day to day be honest he has a great family we met with his family it's tragic but what's really tragic is this is bigger than a police issue this is about all of us i can't stop a group of people from getting on a device like this and showing up all of a sudden in a certain neighborhood we are going to send a strong message but we need your help and we've met with different leaders earlier today i met with the african american leadership in the city of st also from the urban league and other leaders that are here because we all agree how no matter how we look we can't allow this behavior to continue so we're here's what we're doing right now and i'll sit down there's a lot more that i could say i will sit down so that some of the other people can talk we put thirty please you have thirty police officers on the side right now that don't have to respond to calls that can respond to this type of behavior right now if we walk of here they're working i know they're working and they are a visible presence that allows your police officers on the east side to go to the regular calls so they don't have to run into a situation of twenty or thirty or forty people we've documented since june first about six or seven of these incidents where they have happened people just middle of the street fighting with each other many times victims don't even want to cooperate with us my thing is where are the parents and what the heck is going on that's the biggest issue god i can tell you that i've worked in prevention before and we've made things work so we want to look at that but the most serious offenders we are going to arrest you and all of us from the leadership that you have here from the african american community to others we all agree no violence like this should be allowed to happen and we have to arrest and go after those individuals that are perpetrating these types of crimes and we will see you have thirty officers you have bicycle officers i was just at first baptist church and you have bicycle officers people are saying chief we're seeing your bicycle officers on the east side visible presence we're working with them t c chief john harrington my good friend our former chief right here he is helping us because a lot of this activity has happened around transit and bus stops i'm just going to be honest with you transit in bus stops so he is working with us very closely right now we have ramsey county probation we have our mounted patrol officers  to say there's other resources as well working very closely you'll hear from him next hour ramsey county attorney john joyo also with our studio tourney sarah grueling to make sure that when we have charges or officers or arresting people they were paying real close attention to what's going on right here and that those charges go through so those are the things that we're doing right now but it's a longer term issue i can't arrest our way out of this problem i'm not going to tell you that i can we will arrest people but there's a bigger issue about why all of a sudden this year these flash mobs have started to show up specifically in the area i could tell you it's kind of from rural all the way over to mississippi in our keep down the seventh street and even though serious crime is down in this area i can show you the numbers it doesn't matter it's all wiped out because of what is happening we will not put up with it you shouldn't have to put up with it i guarantee you you'll see me here tomorrow night as well thank you thank you very much to have the police chief here the mayor here that's really terrific next we have county attorney john troy john is going to talk about the general prosecution process and the hate bias crime statute john good evening everybody i'm john choi county attorney and i wish that none of us were here tonight because something very tragic horrific horrible has happened on our beloved east side in our community and i remember when i first read the details of this horrific act i was just appalled and what heard about it for me so much is the fact that chief smith talked a little bit about this but we had invested so many things we e doing a lot of great things and we had a great summer last year but this time or it's just not been working out and this act that happened it just ruined all of that and but with respect to moving forward as the mayor talked about i think it's very important role here gathered as a community and as we walk out of this room tonight that we are together and that we are going to be a stronger community now with respect to what  happened on the east side with respect to those prosecutions we have been presented by the police with five cases and we have charged all of those cases out of one adult there are four juveniles with respect to three of those  i can't talk about the details of that because it's not public information but i will tell you that from my perspective as the chief prosecutor we will not tolerate this type of violence and we will find and we will s will seek and we will find justice for ray and his family and this community so that the criminal process is going to play out and people hear from my office who are very dedicated to ensuring that we have accountability and we send a very very strong message but moving forward we have this incident and we're going to deal with it in the criminal justice system but as a community there are important things that we need to continue we need to continue to working on figure out ways to stop this type of behavior and we talked a little bit about  that we had this past the last summer we're going to double our efforts in that particular area i just had a conversation with st paul you services and the chief talked about this but i really think one of the reasons why we had success last summer's that we were going out and finding parents whose children were out past curfew that's what i think the porn part of that is and so we're going to redouble our efforts st paul your services has agreed to continue their work an additional month and so we're going to just go out and try to engage parents and not in a criminal way but try to in a way to find out what what's going on and try to get them so that we can get some intervention going on i think that's very very important that we don't lose sight of the fact that this is not all about arresting people and prosecuting people i assure you we will do that but it's also about as a community how we go about solving this problem this problem of young adults young kids who have nothing to do who are out in the street corners causing problems and we also have to send that really strong message because quite frankly what happened to ray is pure evil and we need to abate that so thank you the next part of our process is to have you you ask your questions and if you have written your questions down that would be helpful you should form a line at the second microphone back there and leslie will be taking cards from people and getting people in order to speak i do want to while we're getting ready to do this i want to introduce gene o'connell is gene here  the chair of the school board in st paul and i want to be sure that gene is recognized when back ok thanks jane i don't any other school board members here that i missed another one also have a panel of people who are going to be ready to answer questions they're going to introduce themselves as they respond to questions i think is the way it's going to work so why don't we take the first question like to know why my name is john over i'm the senior commander for the eastern district so the officers that responded report to me i can't answer that question right now but if you have one of the contact cards i will get your information and i will find out they should  of i can't give you a good answer right now and i would prefer not to try and just tell you something without any kind of factual basis so i saw that you were sit near the front here i'll get your name and contact number and we'll make sure we find out why next question please my name is linda kind of check and i want to bring up a kind of a partly a safety issue and i see kind of kind of gangs in training come in through this area i did draw a map i'll drop up to the chief and i've tried late tuesday after the police department and one of the heads of park know about this but no one seems to have a concern about it there's two brew buildings on the other side of the police block across that respond to a trail there's a smashed up gate where the kids get onto walk way of pipes over the trails about thirty foot drop there's no handrails and i'm concerned they're going to fall and get hurt and then we get to the end on the rainy part of the block at the dead end of rainy right up by the police station area that they have to kind of climb down to get on a real steep thing and come and bail up over the fence to come through rainey right by the police station so i'm drawing a map because i would like that fence that's collapsing in different places besides the gate is open and it does have a cheap piece of chicken wire hooked on to one side of the broken gate but it's not attaching as i and some could easily  want a safety concern for people walking on the pipes across the trail that might fall thanks that thank you for that information and we do have folks from that our department of safety inspections we have parks and rec folks here and so we'll make sure that they get this information i'd i ride the trail quite a bit so i know i know we're talking about and i do want to say though i think one of the great things is as the ham a spurious is being reclaimed for jobs hopefully we can get all that site recovered and so there are no more empty buildings and pipes and and places that kids are getting into because people are working there but well well yeah well work on getting that that thank you next question hi my name is kathy kiefer and i live on the  side of many high my big biggest question is our officers are doing a great job but it doesn't seem like they're being backed up by the administration they're t limbs down but when they do this they get reprimanded and i don't think it's fair they just they need to have the authority to some heads and kick some butt if that's what it takes to get this under control that's what i'd like to kathy thank you for your your comments your concerns we as a police administration for the city of st paul by the by the way my name's todd axtell i'm the assistant chief we do take crime very seriously and we as you can see by we have a lot of police officers here tonight in support of our community members because a lot of us do live in the city and we care a lot about this city but the way we go about doing our business has to be in a way that's reflective of our community standards and we can accomplish we can accomplish the task of making our communities safe by when we do have to use force it has to be reasonable it has to be necessary and it always has to be with respect and we can do that and we can do that in a way that we still lock the bad guys up and i can tell you as a police officer that used to patrol pay an avenue i know that we can lock the bad guys up and still do it with respect and with and community standards thank you just a couple things to i what i want to be clear we have more officers now in the city of st paul than i think at any point in history we've added over thirty eight officers not just patrol officers but we're going to add more sergeants we have we have folks that are now because of some of the investments that the chief is going to make we're going to be able to free up some officers that are currently sitting behind a desk and they're going to get out on the street we're going to add analysts to help analyze some of the data so that we can sense and detect patterns prior to that but i it's a little bit following up on assistant chief x those comments live in this community all my life and i think we're blessed to have one of the best police departments of any city in this country and they do a good job one of the one of the reasons why they do a good job is because they do have the respect of the community and if they lose that respect because they're going around just dumping heads or beating people up for no reason i will guarantee you the work that they do will become ten times more difficult that is not a strategy for success that's a strategy for failure next question  for son just to reiterate so in other words the higher up is not going to help out the officers out on the street is that what you're saying straight out you know i'm not exactly sure where this is coming from and obviously when you have a large police department that some people might have some different opinion but i'll tell you this i've been a cop here for twenty four years in the city all my life have always supported our police officers always now we do hold officers accountable sometimes officers make mistake i expect you folks to hold us accountable for our actions but very seldom i can even think of it such a small number of oscar's that are disciplined in the police department so i'm not exactly sure where this is coming from except to tell you again as assistant chief said we are responsive to the needs of the community we have extra officers over here we have more officers we've got a good leadership team on the east side and we have always supported our officers so and they have an avenue also to talk to us and to talk to me i've been very open so i just want to let you know you've got a good police department we do support what they do i support what they do and sort of their supervisors but thank you for that comm to ok i got to tell you i had a riot that i reported on the first seventy degree day that we had in the salvation army parking lot where mo allison was later killed in july we didn't have a meeting after that then the next seventy degree day we had to write in from my home i live it's one cook avenue for houses off the main avenue and the police department i'll give you lots of credit that guy showed up they brought the horses i think that the helicopter in the air they had perhaps the dogs out they had the street blocked up in traffic going down my street you know my favorite number is nine one one i get asked by drug dealers i get asked by drug dealers why i always call nine one one not my birthday but also it's your number and folks we have got to do a better job and frankly there's one other point i'd like to make is that we need a longer term strategy you know we need a strategy with our children we need to do some intervention and prevention work with our children we need our school board to be engaged in doing something that is proactive that is preventing people from joining yang's and not allowing this putting more resources here that's also why there are some things that have been going on we'll talk about later in the summer as well as we continue to go on that hopefully will make the site a safer place we are continually looking at other strategies senior commander ne erger and his staff are doing a good job you know when the police show up i just want to tell people here when you show up usually and i've seen videos because we have in car camera videos for officers to thirty or forty people well soon as a cop show up a lot of them run a lot of them are and they take off they're everywhere in the neighborhood i don't have thirty officers that can beat feet and catch everybody some of them haven't done anything some of them have some of them have actually stopped and challenge your officers and that is not a good thing and we need to arrest those people and we have been arresting those people but i agree with you that we have seen things that have happened this year the incident you talked about i spoke about earlier absolutely that are going on and that's why we looking i agree with long term strategies this is more than just about the police department there need to be other strategies whether it's with our schools and parks and rec or working with all our partners and i just want to make that very clear thank you greg there's there's a couple things that we can do to help you immediately we'll have our crime prevention person come out to your house tomorrow if we can get you to sign some paperwork that authorizes us to arrest without your being there for trespassing we'll get that up because we've been we've been and we've been making those cases the chief x l and chief smith both talked about there are some restraints that we have to follow i mean there's there's rules that we have to abide by just like everybody else as far as prosecution so will increase the efforts will do the best we can but again some crimes we have to follow a process ok the opposite told my son that we  street those people at it twenty seven while that yeah you're correct with that point that they can't arrest your son for trespassing on his own house ok that that you just can't do that well i'm telling you they can't do that  and we'll make will step up the efforts we've been working their whole case area from pain west and will make sure that we pay special attention to your house next question my name is dale crock and my grandson in the second row up there was when he and his friends went to the fireworks and they were coming home and there was twenty to thirty of them in the process of the ad jesse ended up going to the hospital and he was petrified i could see his stomach even when i got to the hospital but worse than matt my daughter was riding with me and the police officers that answered the phone when we were trying to find out anything were rude to her and they had the same attitude that some of those gang members had glass there should be something in the newspaper that says what the police are allowed to say and not allowed to say because we could not get any information and i have one further thing to add and lesley behind me is going to talk about the same thing so ok so far after three phone calls to the mayor's office i have not yet received a call back just about the same response that we got from the police department the police department have not contacted us yet the one investigation unit first i'd like to say that i'm really sorry that your grandson jesse has been a victim of a crime but we do have a process in place that first of all when you call when you call nine one one those are not just so everybody knows those are not police officers answering the call that that call goes to ramsey county dispatch center their civilian employees so that's a that's a point that we will certainly document on your case will take a look at that will make sure we communicate with that the ramsey county communication center as far as follow up goes we do have our investigative units here tonight will make sure that that is followed up on immediately i'm sure that our investigators are working out we have assistant chief martinez back here today i know that he is listening loud and clear as well so again i'm sorry that that happened we will follow up on that for sure all right i think we should move to the next question or we're going to have to move a little faster here we've used up about half of our question time and we have a long long line of people who want to ask their questions so be very concise in terms of the putting your question before us by name is leslie moore i live about five blocks from here i was a victim of a crime actually my family was a victim of a crime we were beat dragged across the street this happened in may the beginning of may where's my justice nobody made a big deal about it i get the police report and it makes me look like i'm a criminal i have not committed a crime i've lived in this neighborhood for eight years i've bested myself in this neighborhood i work in this neighborhood i i want to know what the police are going to do to make me trust you so that you if i need help you're going to sew up to my defense and make sure that i don't get killed had hoped at and we've had a lot of people here tonight that we will be able to get the incident that happened to you so we can absolutely follow up on i want to tell people something here for the most part some people are happy with our service from time to time we're big city big department but i will tell you this if you get ahold the right person i want to tell everybody this year if you're not happy with the service you get from the person you talk to then you call back and you talk to one of my command staff and i guarantee you that someone will call you back i guarantee you that someone will take action but you have to call the right person no we got into before ma'am you called and you called the emergency communication center and you said to people who are rude to you but if you have investigative questions we're going to take a look that those calls have to come to the right person in the police department and right in nine one one center should be able to tell you that but i want other people to be able to speak but we want to get both of your information so that we can see where your cases are and what has gone on here so that we can help  you i think some of you have had individual issues that the staff aren't going to be able to respond to but i think they do want the information so that they can follow up so if you can put the information on a card about a case that we can't respond to now they will agree to get back to you i have a request of the chief is it possible that someone in uniform could take folks information we do have cards that if there was some place where so many people could just get the information tonight rather than have to make a call tomorrow altho this was just for expediting things can record people's concerns will have officers myself included outside in the area and we'll stay till the last person gets their information passed on to us and i guarantee you get some kind of response from us thank you then they'll come but if it's on edgerton where we live north of maryland maybe they'll show up in forty five minutes maybe they won't we've had cars get rear ended we've had fights going on outside of our house at one o'clock in the morning multiple calls from our neighbors as well as myself and my wife nobody comes no police come at all so i suspect that you have a lot of police officers and you have a lot of things that you need to take care of but you know part of this trend is if if kids don't see any any sort of police response to anything that they do unless they're on pain avenue in front of the salvation army then they're going to get more more aggressive and do more of these things thank you thank you there's two things immediately that i would ask you to do is when you call you can tell the call taker you want to see the officer they will respond and they will come see you if you don't get a response for some reason you call back and you asked talk to one of my supervisors all right now the other piece of that is in the chief alluded to it  ramsey county dispatch handles the tree izing of calls and i'm not trying to push off on another agency but there is a hierarchy of priority of calls and it goes into a pending queue and there dispatch order of priority and then the next order of receipt so if it's a crime in progress action with injuries it goes to the top of the pile and if it's a property damage accident it could well set up to thirty minutes so there are some administrative issues because we've only got so many folks to handle so many calls at a time but with regards to the first part of it you should see somebody and if you want to see him they will be there and if not if you talk to me when we get outside i'll give you my cell phone number next question time my name is jean i live on lost in an arcade i'm a forty year resident and multigenerational in the twin cities my son had a gun stuck in his face during a robbery of t mobile at cedar square my neighbor had four tires removed off of this truck while i was parked in the alley my car was just run out where are you you see that you're here you're not what about holding the storefronts responsible that let these kids congregate what are you doing about making the parents responsible for letting their children roam the streets children that don't feel safe in their own neighborhood what are you going to do about those parents that let these kids run the streets i'm responsible parent why aren't they jean thanks for your comments as far as the parenting issue goes we do work as much as possible with our non governmental agencies to partner with youth initiatives we have several cross the city  programs like the y w c a junior police academy to try to get kids involved and after school activities we also understand that we really can't do it alone it is a community effort we need those calls to keep coming into the police department we all have to take ownership in this community because with six hundred officers we simply can't solve it on our own so we're asking for your help we're asking for your partnership i see the passion i feel the  passion and we do hear you loud and clear thank you westminster case a block club and i appreciate her asking the next question i heard it now i so i live in caves i live in the lower east side of st paul i live there thirteen years i love my neighborhood i think it's awesome i  love everything about the side except the crime i have a childcare business in my home so i have a double effort to keep things safe and report and call on everything and my thing is i have to drive up case say we go to the y and there is a section and you guys heard to it but it's between payne and edgerton on case past the wilder park there is diane was just talking about the woman who said these people camped out on her her porch i took the number down on the way here five ninety four and five eighty eight case she lives at five ninety four these are drug dealers in her porch they are just people that are loitering i've reported it i put it on the facebook  facebook page i have called district five i've called the police the at five eighty eight and i'm sorry for anybody who lives there but it's a drug house and it's like constant what i am i don't understand how somebody can rent a home you buy a home invest where the landlords why aren't they being held responsible for what they bring into my neighborhood no i appreciate it but i do want to say because other people may not know some of the things that we're doing particularly to go after problem properties and problem landlords we do have our folks from inspections here several years ago under the leadership of lantry we went to a registration system so that she's yes she wasn't on the council yet but i know she's amy brenneman as we all love amy but again i just want to say that we are really going after we're we're trying to step it up it's one of the things that we're doing is trying to get out and inspect more of these properties to go after whether speil ations to remove the certificate of occupancy when we can do that if there is and it's and it's not just active drug dealing but really going after unsightly conditions there are a lot of places that we need to step up our efforts but i think it's one of those you know the old broken windows theory which is you go after places that that aren't being cared for because if they're not being cared for a lot of bad things and that can come after that but that is you know it did at your participation in the black clubs a lot of people have come up to in the last couple weeks and said you know what can we do hope that you're engaged in black clubs i hope that you're getting to know your neighbors i hope that you're getting to let us know and be proactive on that and we're going to continue to work on it you have you have a lot of folks in the city but i wanted i wanted to say and this is kind of where we need to step it up because  the challenges that we're seeing right now on the east side is that i want every one of our department directors to put in you know to really work extremely hard to go after these properties right now  where we're seeing these problems come from i truly believe that this is this this is a small handful of folks that are causing the biggest problems and if we can and if we can get them get the landlords that are allowing it get the get the families that aren't watching out for their children as was mentioned fact of the matter is we are working very hard and we're going to step up those efforts could i have the d s i staff raise your hand so that we know where to go to ok great so that if you have questions about that kind of an issue please check in with them we do again i would say have limited time i would ask people to please focus on the specific incidents that we have staff here to address so please try to frame cramer questions in terms of the specific incidents and  then we will allow we can still answer other questions individually later but let's use the expertise stats here christian you're next thank you very much i'll let him settle in my name is chris schweitzer i'm a resident of the side and i'm also a member of the young kids that are hanging around with an actual criminal gang and i want to know why that gang is being allowed to run around and in case for months and months you should know who they are i want to know why aren't they being tracked why aren't they being arrested weren't that mean prosecuted i understand you've got limits but we are uncomfortable on that street and these knuckleheads in that criminal gang who are inspiring these other kids to misbehave in our neighborhood they need to be tracked and i want to know what you're going to do it at break that g that's a great question and i want to tell you one thing for sure and i and i know that we have some of our gang unit here tonight clued in our gang unit commander we have arrested a lot of those individuals already and there are more people to be arrested i don't disagree with you sure that people that are mentoring people into bad behavior need to be taken off the street number one we do have to have charges so that we can make them stick and work with our county attorney or city attorney so we can arrest him i can have my gang unit commander come up here and tell you the number of people that we have arrested many times who were placed by someone else very quickly it's a larger issue but we are continuing with our gang unit to make arrest arrests specifically here on the east side and we will continue to do that but again these gangs these flash mobs are very mobile so they don't all live on the east side some of them we've even work with minneapolis and we usually don't have a lot of interaction between our different groups our cities have different challenges but we know that some of our group is going back and forth with minneapolis people were aware that our gang unit is tracking it we have made arrests and we will continue to do so and i think you what the schools are going to be doing to make our kids safer and helping them i mean making that transit back and forth the schools i mean and i'm surprised at this nobody from the school board is up there and the you don't want to so i think you know that we know that parents are concerned about safety and getting to to and from school this year rather than put money in the bank  whereas we go to closer to home closer to home schools we've gone to transporting kids who live more than a half a mile from home rather than a mile knowing that there are safety concerns and i think that we are open to all kinds of ideas and if community members want to help us in in helping kids walk to school we are more than more than interested in making sure that those things happen we  have safety officers in our buildings we have one of our principals here but we are very concerned about safety just as all of you are thank you again and thank you mr brodrick for coming up i think we'll go to the next questioner now and then let's try to keep him focused on these specific incidents sorry sure my name is mary beth redmond and i moved on to pain ave just six years ago i have just a couple things i have first of all i've raised five kids this poor single mom in st paul it can be done one of my so my son is an artist and i'm quite proud that he's a st paul officer because because there are good people to mentor him but we don't want our police officers having to behave like animals towards anyone we would want them treating human beings like animals and so i'm very proud that he has the people he has to work with to i have worked in the st paul schools for twenty years at central high school i have to say your schools your principals your teachers are your partners but there is only so much they can do when so many of these issues come from parents so again i would say perhaps there are laws about parents put up we have all the youth intervention services what about parent intervention services where are those resources per parent and third just one more thing this is a good one there are wonderful work being done the neighborhood stabilization program i'm looking to sell my house on pain ave every day for the past two weeks we read about the terrible thing that happened a very difficult to sell your house i'm not selling my house to move out of the neighborhood i'm selling my house to hopefully move into one of the neighborhood stabilization houses that are in this neighborhood wait a minute the store tribune reported on the next question yes the name is greg murphy i live on dale street north i have a really bad continuing problem with the rental property next to me and here's the kicker it's owned by a ramsey county deputy who lets us twenty three year old son screen the people in there and this is not minorities these are white kids from eighteen to twenty five i've been threatened with bodily harm the last two weeks i've had garbage thrown at me and hit me and i don't get to sleep until two thirty come over and that happened last week and one of the gentlemen the st paul police officer the way sure don and straight came to talk to her i'd like to see something done here this is absolutely ridiculous as a veteran i've had it with this problem is that for the last july fourth there's a house has been targeted across the street from me that's been shot at three times the reason was monday evening my daughter and myself were out in the front the kids came up the street car when they were looking for this certain car and they shoot at him right in front of us one even maybe from here to you and it's like they're blatant they don't care it's like they come by they're looking for daily i haven't seen him since monday though but i want to catch him i him because that's ridiculous and you should be ticked off i was politically pissed or i guess i can say that here  ma'am thank you i want to tell something to everybody that's here tonight please you've got people that are here in our police officers if you have a problem property next to you because a lot of what we're talking about tonight has to do with properties it has to do or some other social issues but if you have properties we want to hear about it and police and i guarantee you if somebody were spied on to your problem property complaints into earlier question and i don't have even some of the numbers but my gang one of my gang unit sergeants came up here and said with some of the recent incidents on payne avenue that even at pain in case of pain and geranium they've used facebook some of these young people are actually posting very graphic things on you tube where there are salting each other a nd we have taken that to our gang unit because they are very i'm i'm working on the death and they have taken that information and actually receive charges of riot from the ramsey county attorney's office because they've been able to call through and have to look at social media that's very time consuming and we have to find it first that's why i'm asking for other people to help us with that too when you come across at the context somebody the st paul police department gang unit and we have those people that are all here this evening so six people were just charge annette case in july because of we being able to pull up what they posted on facebook so i want people to know that we announced that we wanted to prioritize the local voices of people in district five so if people if you don't live in district five you live in st paul you live elsewhere we'll let you speak but we really need to hear from the residents that's what thank you very much i'm here to i'm here for one reason our parents need to be held accountable our parents i think need to kim i think people are asking you to respect were asked i want to stay on course so i think tori to raid the gentleman that was assaulted this is a tragedy the gentleman that was assaulted nobody has been saying anything about him i feel tragic for the guy was assaulted i also feel that you know what the police need to hold the parents accountable we need to hold the parents accountable all right and that's on my roof and i'm going to tell you this i don't expect the cops to do more than what they're doing because it takes me thirty minutes to get a response anyhow i'm a registered gun or i'm trying to shoot a kill nobody's here come to my house my property i'm a shoot and the my name's harriet i'm a new resident i just moved and i'm arcade and by arcade marilyn i'm going to be honest when i was looking for houses i didn't look on the side i'm from detroit i don't want trouble but i found this and i'm you know i've been held up three times it's all happened to me so but what i want to say is this i'm a teacher and i've been a social worker and this is really what i think you know him please don't shoot anybody's kid you know i was i walk in the classrooms i could tell you i walk right in a classroom and i know who's going to be in trouble i've worked with kids long but here's something i saw in my own little street my one little block there's a family there the father is not mentally capable of raising a child he hasn't he's not a bad person he's just not capable and the mom's not really all together so i've seen people in neighborhood people are helping the kids it's a community we're helping we talk to the kids these are kids are going to be in gangs that's ok so let's just be a community volunteer and  work with the little ones let's get to him before they get into our game volunteer here on the east side it's very apparent that we have a crime problem here and perhaps a very serious gang problem we have  spend ten million dollars on polar bears we can spend ten million dollars on gorillas and they we can spend millions of dollars i'm a homo pool we can spend millions of dollars to remove contaminated s why why why is the east side a budgetary constraints and not a budgetary priority i asked for a let me let me just speak to that because there are a lot of folks in this room that have worked many many years to get investments on the side we saw with the with the failing boulevard and we've seen as a result of that we've seen new housing going in we've seen candles hardware store that is  one of the best new businesses in town we see what six which is you know one of the best restaurants in the twin cities we've seen as a result of the pain of the failing but i had we've seen jobs coming on the side at health partners we've got the new jobs coming into hams perri we've got a lot of investment and i don't think that there's any better i don't think there's any better example of the investment than the building that is going up because people have said they you know we need an immediate response to the challenges that we're seeing and you're going to and you're getting it more officers more in force meant sweeps working with probation tougher charging all of those things but all of us know that the long term solution is the woman that was a social worker had stayed it working with these kids from the early stages getting them into buildings where they can learn how to read getting them into buildings where they can form relationships with trusting adults getting them into buildings where they where they can get a bite to eat after school and they can see that there's a different path and that's the kind of investment fourteen million dollars worth of investment on the side on that block alone in conjunction with great partnerships including the members of this church including including a lot of community groups and the district council and all kinds of folks this man to my right as spent a long time living on the side and i'm going to tell you how long council member bostrom has been on the side because you get sensitive about that but why we used to have a saying when president of the council we can't adjourn until we've given a million dollars to the side but the fact of the matter is we're continuing to invest but we're investing smarter we don't want as buildings that are sitting there empty we want buildings that are filled with life and filled with resources for our children and have the best tools available that's what we're doing across the street and that's what we're doing across  next question and keep the questions focused again on the incidence we're trying to address i love my name saying as you all know i am the parent of one of the kids that is being charged and i would like to respond to the comment that the police chief they make you say where the heck are the parents the parents do be at work which that's where i was when this the it's a place i was at work when i leave my house my kids are at home when i'm at work if my son leave the house i don't have no control of that say to have respect they cuss in here calling these kids her loans and all this stuff ok some kids some kids do fall victim sort of wrong like i say is older people i is in  he will be responsible for his actions yes percent responsible for this thing here i feel like the media is ninety seven percent responsible for this i have heard for one month at least about the two minneapolis white cops that were racist direct hit white and racist and they were being racist just that the other every single day for one month now and all of a sudden things like this are happening these kids are getting drunk getting programmed to hate the white man and some innocent guy walking through the east i didn't know about this he should be here really but he was and and i feel like the little kids that gangster guys that did it have been programmed for some reason maybe to take our guns away from the american people and the media has take you for your comment we appreciate your comment next hundred this year so far then they go to the you service bureau there are a lot of other things we talked about before social issues actually last year we actually through this program the young people picked up we have somebody come and deal with their parents to address just what you said in the woman before we decided to try something different because a lot of the parents were working didn't know what your children were involved with didn't know their children might be involved or being recruited into a gang we had great success we want to mirror that but this year the criminal activity is trumping another words a very violent activity has trumped what we've been able to do in the very but one hundred citations since may first hundred young people been picked up in the eastern district for curfew violations and we ask you all if you see people again after sturdy kids i don't have too many cops around after all of them i'll tell you no event just happened to weeks ago there were thirty girls absolutely there were there they walked right by in fact ran by the eastern district police station and we were able to detain seven or nine of them and that was it the rest of them were gone next question again try to focus on the issues before us hi my name and hear a lot of people talking about their kids your kids you know these are our kids all of going where the parents are i mean we live in a country that incarcerates twenty five percent of the incarcerated population in the world so some of us parents just going around and then you got single parents that are doing the best they can some of them maybe working two or three jobs they're not home at night because they're work in restaurants or their work in health care you know it takes a community so i suggest this finger point maybe people start thinking about hey what can i do how can i get my whole family so i you know now i try to sell my house and try to sell everything but nothing happened and officer and he would do the right thing it come in talk to me just throw me in jail so that broke my family up now you're going to have a problem my kids because they're not getting raised by their father what are you guys going to do today to make sure your officers do the right thing instead of doing the wrong thing and breaking up families instead of hold them together thank you for your comment we do pride ourselves in the st paul police department of being professionals and responsive and try to provide the best quality service when members of our audience members of our community have an experience with a police officer that they feel is not up to the standards of the st paul police department we ask that you reach out to a couple different avenues you have within the police department our internal affairs unit investigates policeman misconduct they do it thoroughly they do it well we also have the police civilian internal affairs review commission community members that look look at these cases not within the police department so we do have checks and balances we try to maintain a positive police force and we do have those avenues please call us if you feel that you've been received less than adequately service thank in that neighborhood and this is a local domestic i want to know why and i asked the chief that personally why and also i have a house that's right across the street from me thirteen sixty four birth street that they did in the house exactly one month before the gang task force was in there raiding the place that was two years ago they are still there they've had ramsey county sheriffs go in and rape the place why they still and then hell's it's a rental unit it needs to be gone and another thing if the gangs are flooding the east side why don't the police let the east side or your last question first comment first are police are flooding the side and they are here i think we talked about that earlier on and you will see them your question about the soccer fields or the rec center i want to tell people something we've got ten school resource officers just summer they're all assigned to rec centers so maybe they don't wear traditional police uniform so i can't answer that question specifically ma'am but the senior commander here from the site i'm sure we will make sure that we follow up to see ours one of our school resource officers assigned there we did it on purpose to interact with our kids to interact with the young people and then finally on the property will take that information and we'll have to follow up with you one now and we'll be able to run that the panel has stayed longer than they had agreed to stay and so i know we're moving beyond their time limits if you him individual situations that you want to ask questions about i would ask that you write those down and approach individually we maybe can take two more questions yet oh ok take it will go ahead with the next question i just want to ask very specific ok let's take the next question and i don't think you know because it's north america and i think it's perceived as a bit more safer because you have brainer that cuts it off and everything like that so i'm here to ask for a bit more patrolling that area and then also i personally went to the game gun strikeforce web page  last month and to see if i context questions about gangs myself how do i recognize gangs and i'm you know mislabeling people as being and again and i emailed the person who was listed as the contact for senate and he e mailed me back and said i haven't been in that post for two years he said i'm not going to pass the buck please call me and that's great paul i don't know it's like i don't know his last name but yeah exactly so that was great but if you could update the website so it's more visible as to what we can do or how we can get in touch with the gang task force that be great i think your request has been acknowledged next question hi my name is pam tollefson i've lived here all my life fifty two years maybe longer than mr b m and my parents live behind me on brainard avenue and i member where she was just talking about my concern is only right now the gang the ham whatever that gang as they're the ones that are causing problems right now i've been going to meetings like this for years and years and i don't think we're ever going to accomplish everything we want but we can take care of the gang that's doing the problems right now i think you've covered that but my one question is loitering i go down pain every day and i look and i look and i look and i want to know why that or if you can do something about people loitering specifically across from us bank police go by there's drug deals i see and i want to take pictures with my phone and the police tied by that's what i want thank thank you ma'am a couple issues and the chief alluded to it earlier chief harrington an m c m c t o police are working the bus stop issue which is where a fair number of them hang out and the two stores that are on the west side of pain are being looked at very closely by are fortunate because we believe that that's what's attracting them down to that corner that i just want to see i contact oh no that's right and again with the additional officers that the chiefs given me effect of started yesterday i think you're going to see a marked difference city attorney sarah i also wanted to add my name is sarah growing up in the city attorney and together with john stack men who is the senior prosecutor in my office the community prosecutor assigned to the east side the other thing we're doing is aggressively when we have specific cases come in this morning we've got someone ordered to stay off of all of pain avenue so when there are cases that come in john in the team are screening those first what's called stay away orders judge millinocket this morning ordered someone to stay at pain avenue completely obviously that's a one those are single instances but we're we're doing everything we can and by the time they get to my office sara i just want to say the victim's father is right behind me so i hope you guys stay  highland park and pain feeling are nearly the same size but we have almost as many it's ten to fourteen as highland macro villain and west some of combined and i feel like we need more programming even schools year round and then the nineteen year old that was charged he lived in dayton's off in the landlord had no clue that he was involved in incidents and i don't know what the the rights are for a landlord or you know what point do they know that there is a problem graham thank you for those comments and there are a lot of young in fact a meeting that we were in before this discussing this with some other very concerned community members we had a meeting at four o'clock and some of our also african american leadership we talked about how many young people live in east side tremendous number and versus how many rec centers all the things that have been discussed tonight more programming that's why we've talked about and we've looked at very creative things like with the use service bureau and other things you know if we can keep the peace then we don't have to throw as many people in jail because parents and other things all the things that are being addressed tonight that i think the police department can't do all of that we can't get to bigger social issue but we get it and we work with all those partners on the landlord part of a suspect that was arrested we don't have a process in place in a police department that that we inform a landlord that someone's been arrested now if someone calls us we will tell them whether or not if that's public information it is once arrested we would tell them that but we don't call landlords to let people know it just i just want to dance for that piece e opinions i think everyone's voice matters and i think everyone has to work together to make this a battle ruled and i really enjoy that you guys are working towards that and i really don't you just don't stop just keep working toward something better on the only thing i'd add that was it wasn't brought up too much would maybe be more talks legislators is that maybe a little pay equity i think poverty has more to do this and all these other issues that it's difficult to raise a child in today's world and even middle class being low class myself i struggle just to keep e so that would be by concerned thank you hello my name is tom rose i've lived on the east side provide thirty five years and this is a very challenging place to raise kids there's so much temptation to change the negative people are able to continue doing what they're doing over and over again my question is for the chief and mr choice it sounds like you're when we make arrests and we present charges to the county or city attorney and the next process obviously when they charge a crime is to go through the criminal justice system with our bench and others and so depending on what happens to that individual whether they're incarcerated or not whether they have any kind of programming when they're incarcerated or not or whether they're even incarcerated and get probation that is something that after i defer to my partner here john choi that can talk a little more closely than that but we present the facts there are times when all of us including me i'm a human i live in st paul get upset when i think a guy or someone that's committed a terrible crime should get more time than they do and there are other times they might get the amount of time that i think is relevant but that is part of the larger criminal justice system i agree with you specially if they come out of prison and are they coming back into the same type of behavior that they were before and we hope that they're not but i'm going to turn this over to john choi well thank you for that question and it's an important one because you know times i think in the criminal justice system it's this giant assembly line and everybody's just doing their part and we're processing cases and sometimes as a prosecutor you know we have to ensure that there's a consequence with respect to a crime but i think there's another thing that we also have to be thinking about and i think it's what you are talking about is the outcome to get kids who are coming into the system especially at an early age to think about how we actually change that behavior because you know we have to think about the fact that we do have a lot of want someone who comes in the system we see repetition over and over again and i do think that we are we are doing some really creative and unique things one of the things that we've just recently did  with respect to the expectations that we have with diversion providers and this will echo the sentiment that's in this from but a big part of it is for these kids and i've spent a lot of time with some of these really at risk kids its connection to a loving and caring adult or a parent and that's what's lacking for so many of these kids and so with respect to some of the outcomes in the services that we want our diversion providers to achieve we're asking diversion providers to think about that other thing too is getting that high school diploma i mean if you don't have a future in this economy criminal behavior sounds like a pretty good thing and so i really think we should have the expectation that all children expect graduate from high school and our parents need to have that so i also think that we're trying to get our to our diversion providers connected to the schools to address the truancy issues because education is the greatest equalizer in this country and it will and it can lift up a community at that time mr bostrom and mr coleman more at that meeting but they said the same words that's you're saying right now we're going to do this we're going to do that we're going to do this everything was alright for a little while to start to calm down again that it was business as usual as nothing has changed we've got to do something about this nothing changes thanks i wonder if i could just comment for just a moment i'm dan bostrom and been a lifelong resident of this neighborhood as matter fick grew up just about a mile from here and when i see this kind of stuff happening  really troubles me because this is absolutely intolerable should not happen but you know the facts of life are folks is there are some evil people out there on the street and you know you can have every intervention program you want under the sun for some of these kids but unless you get the ringleaders off the street and away from them we're never going to be able to do anything with those kids one of the things that the police strategy and i you know i don't know everything about what's going on in the police department but spent several years there myself so i have a sense of how all this stuff operates but one thing i know is that in the years gone by the squads that are working the streets out here on the east side are running from call to call to call i'll tell you that twenty five years ago working on the east side was the best job you could get with the police department in the city of st paul it was called peaceful valley there were four squads that work the entire east side on the midnight shift and between them they may have gotten two or three calls that was it things have really changed in the last few years and what's going on now with this gang activity and so many calls to the police is that the squads are running and they simply don't have the time to do the proactive stuff no what the chief has suggested and what i heard and will hold him to this he said they're sending thirty officers over here as part of their force unit the mona patrol will be around bicycle patrol be around the motorcycles will be around the traffic cars will be around there's going to be it a lot of police officers around here and what that does for some of the other comments i heard out th frees up the other district squads to be able to promptly respond to the other calls for assistance that they get and also to do the patrolling down around the parks and to do those kinds of things that need to be done in conclusion let me just talk about failon park as long as that was brought up something significant happened with that whole failon park issue as a result of that i worked with my colleagues on the consul as lantry for one and we put aside over one hundred thousand dollars and put up for close circuit t v cameras around lake fail and i'll not take any credit for the fact that there really haven't been any major problems around their sense but these bad guys do not want to be seen and it was one of the best investments in my opinion that we have ever made as far as the cost benefit for that failon is going around the lake it's really a rather pleasant experience one of the things we did just within a couple of blocks of this church we put up close circuit t v s cameras at rows and greenbrier also over at paine and maryland and down at case and forest as we have identified some of the hot spots in the area and we've also appropriated the money to buy some more mobile cameras that we can put up as soon as we have some problems out there and the police officers determine ok this is where the trouble is we'll get one of those mobile cameras out there and we're going to do something about that right now this kind of conduct from these troublemakers absolutely cannot be tolerant it is and it will not be tolerated they're here the cops are here they're good guys i've heard some comments about them tonight but if you can call them who you know world you're going to call that's going to protect us those guys are good those women are good they do a heck of a job thank you and i think go ahead ok my name is steve cobb i'm a member of this community and there's a few things that were brought up before me that really met the mark in terms of solving the problem people can complain with the police in shoe you know throw darts at the police but at the same time i've met with some of the members some of the chiefs the commanders that are at this table about teen issues and they do care and they did stay over time at a church i was at once and they do want to solve the problem but i think you know locking kids up you can continue to lock kids up and put them on that pipeline to prison but at the same time if we don't saw the root problem it then there's a constant factor remanufacturing kids because these kids you mentioned evil these kids were born evil they weren't babies and two year olds evil so they were socialized to be that way so if we don't solve and since the entertainment industry and other areas are on our side aren't really on a community or school side in terms of bringing up young people we have to kind of look at what we can do ourselves you can take his to court you can charge them their out some kids who and i know ok i like to have i'd like to have a voice like the last man i have to get that just for ok so i'm saying that you can lock different kids up but what happens is they're continuing to be created and who needs to be in terms of solutions who needs to be empowered to handle the kids if you're not culturally competent to be able to deprogram these kids because i heard about the i see when you don't keep that president ok i'm going to keep it short but when people like when people commit serious crimes and you see them back out on the street it gets very frustrating for the officers and for the officials in the court room so back to who should be able to deprogram these kids since they were not born that way is the community leaders who know the kids who are able to say you know by you creating that crime again being involved in crime and hurting that young man who went to the hospital that justifies other people to now conceal and carry because you think that any family members now you know many family members are going to conceal and carry because they don't want to walk by a dangerous crowd but with their young people don't understand the conclusion what the young people don't understand is that that kind of crime involvement now justified gives people the justification to say i'm going to start packing weapons and so with that we need to empower community leaders who can get to the kids in the kingpins if you can take the campaigns off the street but get to that the followers in the want to be and those black people that are community leaders and upstanding citizens are best qualified through programs to deprogram them because they are out of control and it is a serious problem that all of us are need to be concerned thank you for your comments next question thank you and my name is rob trick up son we have a ministry on dream human pain and we came here to help with the problem that this gentleman and others have identified with the younger children we're going to do what we can there but i've got a question for the county and city attorney about being more proactive with the gangs that seem to be causing most of the problems aren't there rico statutes or some other law that you can  get into it and nail these guys before they beat somebody up well there are lots of tools that are available and chief and from the law enforcement city attorney county attorney we're looking at all of those and so i just assure you i can't talk about some of the things that are active but just please be assured that we are leaving no stone unturned we hear you loud and clear beside me and a lot to all of us up here i guess i get to meet a last one mr grech socolovsky i grew up and he cited st paul behavior performance analyst screw up on the side i speak and train around the country in high schools and colleges and even out the country i take a different perspective you can put a cop on every corner as a policeman i'll tell you if somebody's going to get shit cause trouble they're going to do it it's not about the police what it is it's about all of us coming together there's an old saying there's an old saying if you're not part of the probably a part of the now part of solution or part of the problem everybody in this room keep their yards looking better you see kids smarty knowledge stand tall we allowed this to happen and we're all guilty of it whether it be through how we voted how we've done things support local businesses when local businesses go all because we want to support the alt backs mcdonnell's the local guys goal and then we  empty pane ave another thing to take pride in how you dress talk to these kids as i said we have put on sold many programs the money is not the issue the parents don't support the programs school board meetings are coming up there are camps or clinics you need to support the discipline of the teachers and so forth so all i'm saying is it's a different aspect last comment the state fair this year the state fair this year for the first time in history could not fill their positions they had more than enough applications it's the work ethic that we have that we need to improve with kids and adults i want to thank everybody for coming tonight we appreciate it mr river  go ahead mr rove or yes i want to know is when you board a crime all come when you go down and they make arrests and you go down to the police station and to help you as the bad guy because it's dangerous that criminals but i don't know exactly the case you're talking about but if you request to be nonpublic that should never be public and i don't know exactly the specific case but as far as the other data that we do release it's all governed by state law as far as public information goes so if you'd like to give us the information on that case we will certainly call you back and find out and i'm paula just if that happened to you ok well we'll look into it for you sir thank you very much for time again i want you out thank our panel for being here you've stayed longer than you had committed to stay and i appreciate your being here i hope that people will turn in your questions to staff if you have them tha you to the elected people who were here tonight and this is really just the beginning we need to continue to work on this we need to have not only the police involved but you serving are going to zation so thank you for being here and thank you for continuing to work on this project thank you very much