While MPD sources may tend to point fingers at non-cooperation in the community, the department has made only halting gestures at improving relations. Years' worth of high-profile incidents and confrontations between cops and northsiders, inflamed last winter by the awarding of a medal of valor to an officer who killed a black teenager in 1990 (he later returned it), have heightened animosity toward the MPD. And although now-departed Chief Bill McManus promised to diversify the department when he took over in 2003, the composition of the department has not changed much. As of the beginning of this year, only 16 percent of the 798 male and female officers were minorities. And only 6 percent are African American, though African Americans make up about 18 percent of the city's population.
For now, there is no sign that the gap in clearance rates will close anytime soon. Sixteen murders have happened so far this year; ten of the cases remain open. Seven of those ten victims are black males, and only five of the murders occurred outside north Minneapolis's Fourth Precinct. It's a truism of murder investigations that the longer a case remains unclosed, the less likely it is an arrest will ever be made.
David Fick for City Pages
"I never thought it would happen to one of my sons": Charmaine Williams in front of her north Minneapolis home
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Charmaine Williams says that if the MPD had spent as much time trying to nail down her son's case as they do on other investigations, another murderer would be off the streets. She resents all the police and media attention to the Uptown shooting of a white 25-year-old graduate student, Michael Zebuhr, last month.
Williams also invokes the case of Scot Radel, the St. Cloud State University student who fell into the Mississippi River and died in early February after a night of heavy drinking. "They have expensive machines to find those kids. They kept his case in the news, and on the news, for a whole month. And they found that boy. My son's case? After the first few days, it started growing dimmer. Wasn't nothing else said, wasn't nothing else heard about it."
All told, Radel's name appeared in 13 different stories in the two dailies. Gary Parker's death was mentioned only once, a few days after he was killed.
"It feels like nobody cares," Williams says. "It feels like they just saying, Whatever happens, happens. Like nobody cares that little boys are getting killed. And believe me, I'm probably not the only mother out here who feels that way, who lost their son and there ain't nothing going on with their cases. It happens all the time. Everyone just disappears."
