Patch Candidate Profile: Mickey Moore For Minneapolis Council 9

MINNEAPOLIS — Next week, on Nov. 2, Minneapolis residents will vote in several important local elections. Among the offices on the ballot are the mayor and city council seats, as well as the Minneapolis Park Board.

Mickey Moore is running for Minneapolis City Council in Ward 9.

Patch asked candidates to answer questions about their campaigns and will be publishing candidate profiles over the coming weeks.

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Are you running for office in Minneapolis? Contact William Bornhoft at william.bornhoft@patch.com for information on being featured in a candidate profile and submitting campaign announcements to Patch.

Age (as of Election Day): 52

Town of Residence: Minneapolis

Position sought: Minneapolis City Council Ward 9

Party Affiliation: Democratic Farmer Labor

Family: I have a wife and an 11-year old daughter. My elderly mother is also an important part of our lives.

Does anyone in your family work in politics or government? No.

Education: I attended the University of Minnesota and received a degree in radio and TV broadcasting from Huntington Beach, California.

Occupation: Retired business owner of more than 30 years.

Previous or Current Elected or Appointed Office: None.

Why are you seeking elective office?

More than ever, our city needs an experienced, professional and disciplined leader who has a proven track record of success. My decades of business experience, positively serving our local community and bringing targeted economic opportunities to the chronically underserved will be incredibly helpful as we work together to rebuild and revitalize our commercial districts.

I’m born and raised in this great city, which also means personally experiencing the violent and unfair practices and policies of our policing system. So I bring a deep commitment to Social Justice and police reform. I have a deep understanding of how we can achieve economic equity through inclusion, education and opportunity. There are too many elements of our local political system that are dysfunctional, counter-productive and in need of significant reform and restructuring.
We do have a lot of serious problems facing our Ward today and I want the people of the 9th Ward to be reassured in knowing that there really are intelligent solutions for ALL of these issues. What we need are mature and dedicated public servants that know how to bring people together to work to solve our problems and implement the good ideas without resorting to fighting and partisan political grandstanding. I want people to feel united in our effort to make our Ward and our city stronger, safer, more prosperous, more inclusive, more just and more peaceful for everyone. For our families, for our neighbors and for our future. We need more and we deserve more. In short, we need someone who will always put people first. As a lifelong resident of this city, this is the type of leader I would want, and this is the type of leader I will be.

The single most pressing issue facing our (board, district, etc.) is _______, and this is what I intend to do about it.

The single most pressing issue facing our Ward is our Public Safety and the unprecedented rise in crime and this is what I intend to do about it. We need more police. We need more police resources. We need a smarter and more effective strategy regarding our distribution of the resources we gather and we need a comprehensive plan to reform, re-imagine, improve and restructure how we police our city.

Public safety is more than just crime. If we are truly going to solve the public safety crisis we are in right now, we must respect and recognize the comprehensive nature of the problem. It’s going to take an approach that acknowledges the role that issues such as homelessness, drug use, sex trafficking, domestic abuse, alcohol addiction, and other contributing factors play in making our lives, neighborhoods and families feel more vulnerable and less safe.

Shootings, stabbings, carjackings, gun use, and violent crime grabs most of the headlines and creates a lot of fear within our community. For Ward 9 residents, it discourages travel, investment, and steers us away from frequenting local businesses and establishments in our own neighborhoods. Therefore, public safety is part of a larger cyclical downturn that can ruin cities and make life unlivable for residents and force out otherwise viable and successful businesses.

Last Summer, after the murder of George Floyd many elected officials, especially those on our city council, made amazingly irresponsible and dangerous statements in which they pulled support away from our police officers specifically and the department in general. This caused a loss of staffing of unprecedented levels. We’re now operating with skeleton crew staffing and cannot possibly respond to all the calls for assistance.

To begin to counteract the damaging effects of past bad decisions, we must begin a new process of re-staffing our police department to its fullest capacity. We need to hire hundreds of new officers, equip our department with more resources and implement techniques and methods that increase effectiveness and efficiency. I believe we can do all that, while also updating our police department from a 1950’s model to a 20250, forward thinking model, effective right now, and for decades into our future.

We need to focus on diversity and inclusion in our hiring practices, bringing in more women, more minorities, and more multi-lingual speaking candidates. Including people from our LGBTQIA+ community. We should also be targeting people who are Minneapolis residents and provide meaningful incentives for officers who live in our communities.

We need to restore our funding for police department including incorporating raises and bonuses to equal the pay that they would get in other, safer cities to prevent their relocating. These funds can provide better training and equipment. More training in areas like de-escalation techniques, violence intervention and public courtesy. Equipment such as closed-circuit cameras, adhesive tracking devices, and a more collaborative radio and communications system that ties everyone to a central dispatcher.

We need a full spectrum of human resources so that we can always apply the correct and appropriate response to every call. A significant percentage of calls do not require an armed response, and so we must coordinate our mental health responders, our social workers, our crisis interventionists, and other unarmed assistants into our regular active-duty protocols. Most of the problem interactions between the police and the community would not have happened if we had the available and correct personnel involved from the beginning.

We need more community level policing. Foot patrols, bicycle patrols, and walking beat officers need to be dispersed into our highest crime areas, establishing new and better relationships with the residents and businesses that they are there to protect and serve. Additionally, it has already been proven that private security sub-contractor operations, tasked to reinforce local crime “hotspots” have a huge impact of lowering and deterring crime. These cooperative relationships are not only useful in many ways, but they are also incredibly cost-effective.

For the police to be effective, there needs to be a feeling of partnership and trust with the community they serve, therefore, we must focus on rebuilding that faith and trust. By offering meaningful gestures of reparations” to the community, we will take the first steps in proving that these new reforms are not meaningless words. Moves like ending the use of attack dogs as police accomplices and re-opening old cases of excessive force or fatal encounters with the police will help prove to our community that we are serious about changing the old style of policing, and beginning something radically new, better, and different.

Messaging has long been a problem with this department. I would work to revolutionize the way in which our department communicates with the public. Remove the police spokesperson, and replace them with a local, community spokesperson. A trusted member of the community, who works on our behalf to make certain that facts are accurate, and that only the whole and truthful story, whether it is positive or negative, becomes the narrative.

Community and social programs are the best way to provide uplifting alternatives to drugs, guns, and gangs, especially for our at-risk youth, so, investment through the department, into community-oriented options and opportunities will yield a tremendous return. We need to apply everything we have, park and rec. sports, boys and girls club and YMCA programs, or public/private affiliations with Boys’ and Girls’ Scouts, Pillsbury House, or district-sponsored afterschool activities, to giving young people their best choices that steer them away from negative influences and destructive culture.

We need to liaison with our state and federal partners to create and alter legislation that furthers our efforts and goals. There are current laws that would need to be removed or amended, such as Stanek’s state law regarding residency or the current federal guidelines covering qualified immunity that all need to be revisited and adjusted for “best practice” effectiveness.

Lastly, let me mention accountability. While most residents in the 9th Ward all agree that we need more police and more police resources, they will also quickly add that we need more accountability, transparency, and oversight. This means, the rules and policies that force our police officers to behave better must be implemented and followed under strict punishment of termination. Our executives and administration must be empowered with the ability to discipline and terminate bad officers, we need a community-based oversight committee that has both the authority and the access to view any footage, call witnesses under oath, examine police reports, and make recommendations that result in action.

I’ve lived in Minneapolis my entire life, and in 52 years, we have never had a better moment, or a more critical opportunity to make significant and transformative changes and upgrades to our policing system. We have a chief who is from our community, who grew up here and understands this department. We have a new police union president who is willing to listen to ideas and compromise for the betterment of the city and the officers she represents. We have a city that is 100% behind making bold, new improvements that address the historic imbalances and discrimination that has persisted for so long. So, I am truly hopeful that this city will vote “NO” to the politically poisonous ballot initiative, and “YES” to a platform of candidates who will address this public safety crisis with the pragmatic and solution-oriented professionalism needed to solve it completely, for now and for all time.

What are the critical differences between you and the other candidates seeking this post?

I have created an entire industry and spent the last 25+ years developing real, gainful economic opportunities for people, including marginalized, and underserved minority communities. As a black man, who has focused on minority oriented and operated businesses, I understand precisely how important the commercial districts of our ward are, and what collaborative steps our city government needs to take to insure vitality and growth in this sector. Additionally, while I am a lifelong pragmatic, progressive Democrat, I'm also an unbiased, nonpartisan and completely responsive representative for every community. Making sure that the views of all people are always given the highest priority and that everyone feels like they are heard and has a seat at the table when important decisions are being made.

If you are a challenger, in what way has the current board or officeholder failed the community (or district or constituency)?

If we just let the facts speak for themselves, we can see clearly that our current officeholder (who is not seeking re-election) has left our ward in far worse shape. Homelessness is exponentially worse, our Ward is ground zero for tragic issues such as drug and substance use, abuse and overdose deaths, as well as problematic neighborhood crimes like sex trafficking and prostitution. More of our streets are lined with trash, needles, broken glass and worse. Our city council member was one of the elected officials who stood on a stage in Powderhorn Park and called for the defunding of the police, a message which resulted in hundreds of police officers leaving our department, and coincided with the dramatic escalation of serious crime and gun violence. They were also originally against the community led East Phillips Urban Farm initiative. Most importantly, the resounding understanding from all Ward residents and business owners is that they have been completely disconnected and unresponsive to inquiries, comments, feedback and input from the people. The overwhelming consensus from people I speak to, is that the 8 years were an abysmal failure on almost every level.

I believe the response of local officials has been slow and confusing. There was little or no collaboration between levels of govt. People have received mixed messages, or late information about critical details. Not enough community-based outreach was ever initiated. Too many important decisions were passed to other departments or agencies. It's not a coincidence or an accident that minority communities are still being disproportionately affected and even now, not enough is being done to counter the dangerous anti-vaccination narratives that are holding up our solution to this epidemic.

Describe the other issues that define your campaign platform.

While Public Safety, Business Revitalization and a new commitment to a truly collaborative style of representation are the top 3 issues that define our platform and positions, and I'll offer a few details about those 3 items here, I want to include several other important issues that I hear from people in our Ward. These include re-opening George Floyd Square and creating a meaningful national memorial level space, worthy of the issues his tragic murder brought to light, ending our downward spiral into a worsening Affordable Housing crisis, cleaning up our streets, literally and figuratively, implementing a new focus on diversity, equity and inclusion throughout our city government departments and programs, making progress on our homelessness crisis, among others.

We need to solve our police reform issues. We're in the midst of a public safety crisis, we need more police, not less or none. I will work to restore our staffing resources ,while simultaneously implementing strategic reforms and improvements that build back our trust and faith in equatable policies and procedures that eliminate tragic outcomes.

We need to funnel resources into our commercial corridors and business districts. It's not enough to simply, have the money and the programs, we also have to put boots on the ground making sure all the businesses, especially the minority and immigrant owned operations, which are always disproportionately left out of the opportunity matrix, are included as primary targets.

I am the only candidate who will have a fully staffed, local office, open everyday to address the needs of our community at the local level. No appointment needed, staffed by people who speak our languages and come from our neighborhoods. This unique opportunity to access resources, programs and services from the city, county, state and federal levels, will revolutionize the way our Ward interacts and benefits from our govt.

What accomplishments in your past would you cite as evidence you can handle this job?

I started a business that began an entire industry. I fought our state to legalize and legitimize an industry they wanted to oppress. When I opened the Braid Factory, we were the first and only natural hair care salon. Now, there are over 45 natural hair care locations, including several in the 9th Ward, gainfully employing hundreds of African American and Immigrant women. I have managed people, worked across agencies to overcome significant obstacles and balanced large budgets. It's not an accident that several of my businesses have been very successful and well supported by our community. Ward 9 has the most small businesses, including minority and immigrant owned businesses, and as someone who has mentored so many people in entrepreneurship and business development, I know that I have the skill set to provide the exact type of assistance our Ward needs.

Don't be afraid to fail, it's one of the greatest learning opportunities you'll ever have.

What else would you like voters to know about yourself and your positions?

I have personally canvassed this Ward 3 times. I include my direct phone number on all of my material and have handed our almost 25,000 business cards so far. If anyone ever wanted to call and speak to me, I always answer my own phone, and I encourage people to do just that. Websites and questionnaires are useful, but nothing beats a real conversation, and I look forward to talking with anyone who cares about how we solve the very serious problems our city is facing today. 612-220-0233