Brooklyn Center mayor on rejected policing changes: 'I felt deceived'

BROOKLYN CENTER, Minn. (FOX 9) - Over a week after the Brooklyn Center City Council voted down police policy changes for traffic stops, many people still don’t know why, including the mayor. Wednesday, FOX 9 interviewed Mayor April Graves about the vote. 

"I felt deceived a bit," she said. "Because they could have brought up concerns and questions during the meeting. They had an opportunity to do that before we voted, and they didn’t."

Graves said she worked for a year and a half with many groups and people including Katie Wright, the mother of Daunte Wright, who was mistakenly shot and killed by former Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter, and Brooklyn Center police to come up with a compromise everyone accepted.

"We could have discussed it at the work session at the beginning of the meeting. Or we could have discussed it right at voting, and they didn’t bring it up at all. So that felt a little bit to me like the intention was to say nothing, so we can just stop talking about it and get it out of the way. I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s how it felt."

Katie Wright and her supporters were outraged, with Wright screaming at the council after the vote.

The proposal would have prohibited officers from conducting traffic stops for any combination of the following offenses:

• Invalid or expired registration
• No functioning license plate lamp, no operative muffler
• Exceeding motor vehicle noise
• Objects suspended between the driver and the windshield like an air freshener
• Improperly displayed registration sticker and driving with only one working headlight or rear light

FOX 9 reached out last week and this week numerous times to council members Dan Jerzak, Teneshia Kragness, and Kris Lawrence-Anderson, who all voted against the policy changes for traffic stops. They did not respond so we still don’t know why they voted against the measure. The mayor said she is disappointed but not deterred.