• Facilitate community visioning to learn from neighbors about crime and safety challenges in their neighborhoods and their vision for improvements and ideas for prevention measures.
  
  
• Organize block clubs on every block in the 4th Ward and all of North Minneapolis and screen and train block club leaders and support neighborhood events.
  
  
• Involve ex-offenders in community safety planning and community policing, allowing and encouraging those who are open to participating in community building activities.
  
  
• Create effective and sustainable gang intervention program to reach out to gang members and potential recruits to coordinate counseling, facilitate conflict resolution, life planning / life coaching, encourage and connect them to opportunities for positive & safe alternative lifestyles.
  
  
• Advocate, lobby, and promote truly rehabilitative corrections systems involving effective reentry preparation, counseling, family (kids) unification supports, education on health, reading, writing, arithmetic, history, religious / spirituality studies and practice. 
• Mandate convicts to learn in prison to earn privileges and spend time productively, in a growth oriented manner that promotes and facilitates dignity, self-knowledge and self-determination to defeat self-defeatist attitudes and immoral habits. 
  
  
• Youth incarceration diversion: identify all at-risk youth and intervene in their lives to encourage good citizenship and cautioning them to not commit crimes of ignorance, desperation and rage.
  
• Create a devoted police unit with community partnerships to focus on positive youth outreach and engagement to interact with and get to know all at-risk youth who are obviously out of school during school days and inappropriate hours, all large groups of youth who are roaming the community disruptively, to encourage them to do right and refer them to healthy venues and opportunities.
  
  
• Employ ex-offenders!  This is the best way to prevent recidivism (re-incarceration).
  
  
• Give immediate warnings (don’t procrastinate) to suspected crack and meth house operations, proposing an avoidance of an imminent raids and incarceration if an agreement is immediately made to discontinue production and / or distribution of dangerous illegal drugs. 
  
  
• Never take away the right to vote from any ex-offender – Minnesota should follow the model of the states of Maine and Vermont who never do.  Disenfranchisement perpetuates crime.
  
  
• Incarcerating drug addicts and severely mentally ill people without providing appropriate treatment is a recipe for recidivism. Severely addicted and feigning drug addicts are easy to notice!  Get them into effective treatment!
  
  
• Many residents can see crimes committed in public and wonder why certain criminal activities seem to continue for days and weeks without police intervention.  Perhaps more undercover, proactive patrols (less marked cars and uniformed officers) should be deployed to troubled areas to surveill and swiftly stop openly public crimes that are obvious to resident eyes. 
  
  
• Support more frequent community events (National Night Out is great, but would be greater if organized a few times annually with greater outreach, perhaps during the spring, summer and fall seasons) to increase a sense of community by facilitating neighbors meeting and getting neighbors to know their neighbors, which is the best way to make our blocks safe.
  
  
• Focus on cleaning up areas with significant blight and litter.

Police Reforms  

• Make police officers get out of their squads more to walk “beats” and get to know neighbors to develop good rapport and establish mutual respect and trust.
  
  
• Improve community / police relations by facilitating meaningful, ongoing discussions with police and neighbors, including ex-offenders on probation / parole who are neighbors interested in producing effective strategies to prevent crime.
  
  
• Actively prohibit racial profiling by officers; screen the force and academies to remove all racist cops and train all officers intensely for cultural competence, evaluating them regularly and developing best practices to reduce racial inequities / injustices in the criminal justice system.
  
  
• Ensure full compliance of MPD with the federal mediation agreement brokered by the Department of Justice with the community to achieve full progress in all areas of police incompetence and corruption. 
  
  
• Support psychological needs of officers, because we know their job is dangerous, often frightening and infuriating and that their faith in humanity is frequently tested; improve benefits and policies to keep the officers holistically healthy to prevent emotional instability, and (unethical) abuses of power and unjust violations of the public. 
  
  
• Honor exemplar officers!
  
  
• Terminate officers who repeatedly use unnecessary force, make unacceptable remarks or engage in any abuses of power to establish real accountability of officers.
  
  
• Prosecute and incarcerate criminal officers and end police culture of anti-snitching to effectively discourage police misconduct.  Increasing community trust in police would reduce reluctance on the part of too many community members to cooperate with them. 
  Anti-snitching goes both ways.
  
  
• Explore idea of innovative police housing on the Northside, even if it is nice condos for cops; officers who live in the community will respect the community more and earn greater trust and cooperation from community members – perhaps the chief of police should live on the Northside and not in Edina.