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NEIGHBORHOODS
Cedar-Riverside weighs safety priorities Recent shootings have drawn residents, businesses, police and officials to conversation.
ELLEN SCHMIDT, DAILY
LEFT: Kowsar Mohamed, a University graduate student at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, poses for a portrait outside Wilson Library on Tuesday, March 9. Mohamed grew up in Cedar-Riverside and hopes to help communities similar to it through her career in urban planning. RIGHT: Cedar Riverside Opportunity Center Manager Saeed Bihi poses for a portrait at the center on Tuesday, March 9. Bihi is working to increase activities and programs for youth in the neighborhood in an effort to keep them off the streets.
BY MOHAMED IBRAHIM mibrahim@mndaily.com
The Cedar-Riverside neighborhood is known for its diversity, which extends beyond residents’ cultural backgrounds and into recent conversations surrounding public safety. Some residents and business owners have called on the City of Minneapolis to increase police presence in Cedar-Riverside and allocate more resources to address recent violent crime incidents in the area. Other members of the community feel increased dialogue, specifically by giving younger residents a seat at the table, should be the priority. According to Minneapolis Police Department statistics, crime in CedarRiverside is down in 2019 so far compared to this time last year. But recent incidents, including a shooting Feb. 19 near the Cedar Cultural Center and a triple shooting March 1 that resulted in the death of 17-year-old Abdiwasa Farah prompted the community to mobilize.
City officials respond
After meetings with community members on March 5 and 6, MPD temporarily changed the shifts of two Somali beat officers assigned to the neighborhood in February from mornings to evenings. As the weather gets warmer and Ramadan approaches, the community is u See CEDAR-RIVERSIDE Page 3
“I don’t feel like they have the avenue or the spaces or the platforms that have been built for them to feel like they’re safe to share what their narratives are, what their big questions are, what their big ideas are.”
“When we treat [that] core problem [of a lack of resources for Cedar-Riverside youth], sometimes it would address more for the community than to bring more officers into the streets.”
KOWSAR MOHAMED University graduate student
SAEED BIHI Cedar Riverside Opportunity Center manager
CITY GOVT.
STUDENT LIFE
City aims for victim-centered sexual assault policy
U students paid $620K in TCF fees
The policy will use traumainformed interview tactics during police investigations. BY MIGUEL OCTAVIO moctavio@mndaily.com
A new policy aims to make sexual assault investigations in Minneapolis more victim-centered. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minneapolis Police Department Chief Medaria Arradondo rolled out a new set of
sexual assault policies for MPD last week, according to a press conference recorded by WCCO. Based on state recommendations, the policy incorporates guidelines for officers and investigators on how to best interview and support victims. “Survivors experience unspeakable trauma,” Frey said at the press conference. “Honoring their bravery requires that we make every effort to ensure investigations are handled with compassion and ultimately guided by the goal of delivering justice.” The policy is modeled after the attorney general’s task force’s recommendations and
the Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training’s guidelines. Frey and Arradondo also collaborated with sexual assault survivors and advocacy groups like the Aurora Center for Advocacy & Education earlier this year to help inform the policies. The new policy comes after a Star Tribune report exposed police misconduct in several sexual assault investigations and prosecutions state-wide last year. One aspect of the guidelines is “trauma-informed” interview tactics for u See MPLS POLICY Page 3
But inherent to that, there’s a history of forgetting,” said University history professor William Jones. “[Former president Lotus Coffman] encouraged students to embrace the idea of going into a place and establishing a society. But implicit in that is forgetting that that place was already occupied by Dakota and Ojibwe.” Jones was a member of the Task Force on Building Names and Institutional History, which created a report that u See PIONEER Page 3
u See TCF Page 3
COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES; DAILY FILE PHOTO
LEFT: Pioneer Hall on the Minneapolis campus in 1934. RIGHT: A view from the top floor of Pioneer Hall during renovation on Thursday, June 14.
The fifth name: History hangs on U’s Pioneer Hall
BY JAKE STEINBERG jsteinberg@mndaily.com
Next fall, the newly renovated residence hall will welcome students to live in a new multicultural living-learning community in a building that once contributed to segregation on the University of Minnesota campus.
But what has changed since the hall opened in 1931 highlights what hasn’t. The ongoing debate over building names and institutional racism at the University has cast fresh eyes on the building’s 88-yearold name. By keeping the name “Pioneer,” some members of the campus community say the residence hall notorious for its ghost stories will remain haunted by an unacknowledged history of land theft and ethnic cleansing. “Choosing names is a way of marking and sort of memorializing a particular history.
BY NORAH KLEVEN nkleven@mndaily.com
The U.S. Public Interest Research Group released a report last week that found University of Minnesota students on the Twin Cities and Duluth campuses paid more than $620,000 to TCF National Bank in card fees during the 2017-18 school year. According to the study, 44 percent of the University’s student body hold TCF bank accounts. They pay an average of $22 in fees annually, which mainly include overdraft and out-of-network ATM fees, according to Kaitlyn Vitez, the higher education campaign director at U.S. PIRG — an advocacy group that works to protect consumers. Inactivity fees were also cited in the report as a source of fees. TCF Bank debit cards are heavily marketed to students as a “simple, easy” choice, and these accounts can be linked to U-Cards and used to deposit financial aid. Vitez said while $22 in fees per year may not seem significant, these fees have serious implications. She noted there are banks available to students that carry no ATM or overdraft fees and there was a wide disparity between the amount of fees paid by individual students. While many paid only a few dollars in fees throughout the year, others were hammered with potentially hundreds of dollars in fees, she added. The University entered into a paid marketing agreement with TCF Bank in 2003. It granted broad rights to the national bank, including rights to open bank locations, marketing rights on campus and to install TCF Bank ATMs, in addition to other stipulations. “These types of agreements generally involve a payment from the bank to the school, and may also include non-monetary support, such as staff support, publicity, etc.
RENAMING
As renovations conclude, some question the name of UMN’s first residence hall.
A report found UMN students pay an average of $22 in TCF Bank annual debit card fees.
POLICY
UMN Senate resolution seeks mandatory training to accommodate those with disabilities The resolution advocates for better disability accommodation training for University faculty. BY KAIT ECKER kecker@mndaily.com
University of Minnesota Senate committee members have greenlighted a resolution asking for required training for faculty, instructors and student teaching assistants
on best practices for accommodating disabilities, solidifying its path to the full senate in May. The Student Senate and the Senate Consultative Committee voted in favor of the resolution last week. The Council of Graduate Students unanimously supported the resolution at the end of March. Last year, 3,736 students registered with the Disability Resource Center, according to DRC Director Donna Johnson, and there are other students with disabilities who are
not registered. As the population of students with disabilities has increased, more students have registered with the DRC. The resolution, originally crafted by the Organization for Graduate and Professional Students with Disabilities and the Disabilities Issues Committee, would help serve the growing population of people seeking DRC services. “We think that having that common dialogue and foundation in order to better serve this group of students is critical, because the
number of students with disabilities in universities, including ours, is only going to increase over time,” said Ryan Machtmes, vice president of OGPSD. The resolution would help faculty understand their role in accommodating a disability and the role of the DRC in carrying out those accommodations. “As more faculty are receiving letters, they’re interested in learning more u See RESOLUTION Page 3
VOLUME 119 ISSUE 52