MINNEAPOLIS: Minneapolis police Chief Janee Harteau resigned Friday at the request of the mayor, who said she lost confidence in the chief after last weekend’s fatal police shooting of an unarmed Australian woman who had called 911.
In a statement released Friday, Harteau said: “I’ve decided I am willing to step aside to let a fresh set of leadership eyes see what more can be done for the MPD to be the very best it can be.”
Mayor Betsy Hodges said she asked for the chief’s resignation.
“I’ve lost confidence in the Chief’s ability to lead us further ... it is clear that she has lost the confidence of the people of Minneapolis as well,” Hodges said. “For us to continue to transform policing — and community trust in policing — we need new leadership at MPD.”
Hours later, Hodges tried to elaborate on Harteau’s departure at a City Hall news conference but a few dozen protesters walked in and shouted her down. They waved signs with the phrases “Messy Betsy” and “You are next” on them and chanted “Bye-bye Betsy.” Hodges eventually gave up and left.
Harteau, who worked her way up from the bottom of the department to become the city’s first female, first openly gay and first Native American police chief, said she was proud of the work she accomplished and honored to serve as chief. But she said the shooting of 40-year-old Justine Damond by one of her officers and other incidents “have caused me to engage in deep reflection.”
The chief, who once successfully filed a discrimination and sexual harassment complaint against the police force along with her partner, said she must “put the communities we serve first” despite the department’s accomplishments under her leadership.
Harteau was out of the city on personal time for nearly a week following last Saturday’s shooting of Damond, a life coach and bride-to-be who was killed by an officer responding to her 911 call of a possible rape.
The state is investigating the shooting. In Harteau’s first remarks on the case Thursday — when she returned to work — she was sharply critical of Officer Mohamed Noor, who is Somali-American, while defending his training.
“The actions in question go against who we are in the department, how we train and the expectations we have for our officers,” Harteau said Thursday. “These were the actions and judgment of one individual.”
That wasn’t enough for some City Council members. Linea Palmisano, who represents the ward where Damond died, called for a change in leadership Friday and told her fellow council members that she was “done with image control and crisis management” and that it’s “time for action.”
After Harteau’s resignation, Palmisano thanked the mayor and her colleagues. She also thanked Harteau for her years of service, but said she looks forward to the start of changes that she feels the department needs to make.
A department spokesman said Harteau would not be available for an interview after Friday’s resignation.
Shortly after the announcement, Hodges nominated Assistant Chief Medaria Arradondo to be the next chief. Nicknamed “Rondo,” he served as the department’s public face after Damond’s shooting while Harteau was out of town.
Arradondo, who is African-American, has been with the department since 1989.
Harteau has spent her career with the department, starting as a beat cop in 1987 when she was just 22. After working her way up the ranks, she was appointed chief in 2012.
She’s had a rocky tenure in the top post and had become a political liability for Hodges, who’s in a tough re-election fight. Their relationship was strained, particularly after the fatal shooting of 24-year-old Jamar Clark during a confrontation with two white police officers in 2015. The black man’s death, amid heightened tensions around the US, sparked protests citywide that included an 18-day occupation outside the police station on the city’s north side. A US Department of Justice review faulted poor communications between the mayor and the chief.
The chief and mayor butted heads again in April when Hodges blocked Harteau’s promotion of Lt. John Delmonico to lead the Fourth Precinct, after the chief had already made the public announcement. Delmonico had been a critic of Hodges when he headed the police union.
And it didn’t help that Harteau was out of town when Damond was killed. Harteau, who said she was backpacking in an area with limited cellphone reception, told reporters Thursday that it would have been “challenging” to return but that she had kept in touch with her command staff.
Harteau and her longtime patrol partner, Holly Keegel, were featured in a 1990 episode of the reality TV series “Cops.” The partners endured years of harassment from some male colleagues, and it escalated to the point where they felt endangered because they weren’t getting help when they would call for backup. The Minnesota Department of Human Rights upheld their discrimination and sexual harassment complaint, which led to changes in training and to discipline against some officers.
Harteau and Keegel got married in 2013 after gay marriage became legal in Minnesota. Harteau told the Star Tribune a year later that they had separated amid the strains of her being chief.
The chief was honored as grand marshal of the city’s annual Pride Parade three years ago. But she found herself on the defensive in June when organizers asked law enforcement to minimize their participation due to tensions over the recent acquittal of St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez in the fatal shooting of another black man, Philando Castile, in the St. Paul suburb of Falcon Heights last summer.
She said she was “beyond disappointed” that she was not consulted beforehand, but later persuaded the organizers to welcome LGBT officers after all.
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Associated Press writer Kyle Potter contributed from St. Paul, Minnesota.
Minneapolis police chief resigns after shooting death of Australian who called 911
Minneapolis police chief resigns after shooting death of Australian who called 911
Indonesia’s Supreme Court reverses acquittal of former official in slavery case
- A police investigation found 665 people had been held in cells on his property since 2010
JAKARTA: Indonesia’s Supreme Court jailed a former government official accused of human trafficking for four years, reversing a lower court decision to acquit him after people were found in cages in his palm oil plantation.
Condemned internationally and at home, the senior official in the provincial government in North Sumatra, Terbit Rencana Perangin-angin, had been accused of human trafficking, torture, forced labor, and slavery.
Prosecutors launched an appeal after a lower court acquitted him of the charges in July.
Indonesia’s Supreme Court said he would serve four years in jail, without specifying reasons, in a ruling dated Nov. 15 and seen on the court’s website on Tuesday.
The Supreme Court and prosecutors did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Reuters has sought comment from Terbit’s lawyer.
The macabre case came to light in 2022, when a police corruption investigation into Terbit found people detained in cages on his property, drawing condemnation from rights groups.
A police investigation found 665 people had been held in cells on his property since 2010, court documents showed.
Terbit, who was jailed for nine years for corruption in 2022, had previously claimed the detained individuals were participating in a drug rehabilitation program.
Prosecutors said they had been tortured and forced to work on his plantation. Six had died in captivity, Indonesia’s rights body found.
Four Pakistan security forces killed as ex-PM Khan supporters flood capital
ISLAMABAD: Pakistani protesters demanding the release of ex-prime minister Imran Khan on Tuesday killed four members of the nation’s security forces, the government said, as the crowds defied police and closed in on the capital’s center.
More than ten thousand protesters armed with sticks and slingshots took on police in central Islamabad on Tuesday afternoon, AFP journalists saw, less than three kilometers (two miles) from the government enclave they aim to occupy.
Khan was barred from standing in February elections that were marred by allegations of rigging, sidelined by dozens of legal cases that he claims were confected to prevent his comeback.
But his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party has defied a government crackdown with regular rallies. Tuesday’s is the largest in the capital since Khan was jailed in August 2023.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said “miscreants” involved in the march had killed four members of the paramilitary Rangers force on a city highway leading toward the government sector.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said the men had been “run over by a vehicle.”
“These disruptive elements do not seek revolution but bloodshed,” he said in a statement. “This is not a peaceful protest, it is extremism.”
The government said Monday that one police officer had also been killed and nine more were critically wounded by demonstrators who set out toward Islamabad on Sunday.
The capital has been locked down since late Saturday, with mobile Internet sporadically cut and more than 20,000 police flooding the streets, many armed with riot shields and batons.
The government has accused protesters of attempting to derail a state visit by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who arrived for a three-day visit on Monday.
Last week, the Islamabad city administration announced a two-month ban on public gatherings.
But PTI convoys traveled from their power base in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the most populous province of Punjab, hauling aside roadblocks of stacked shipping containers.
“We are deeply frustrated with the government, they do not know how to function,” 56-year-old protester Kalat Khan told AFP on Monday. “The treatment we are receiving is unjust and cruel.”
The government cited “security concerns” for the mobile Internet outages, while Islamabad’s schools and universities were also ordered shut on Monday and Tuesday.
“Those who will come here will be arrested,” Interior Minister Naqvi told reporters late Monday at D-Chowk, the public square outside Islamabad’s government buildings that PTI aims to occupy.
PTI’s chief demand is the release of Khan, the 72-year-old charismatic former cricket star who served as premier from 2018 to 2022 and is the lodestar of their party.
They are also protesting alleged tampering in the February polls and a recent government-backed constitutional amendment giving it more power over the courts, where Khan is tangled in dozens of cases.
Sharif’s government has come under increasing criticism for deploying heavy-handed measures to quash PTI’s protests.
“It speaks of a siege mentality on the part of the government and establishment — a state in which they see themselves in constant danger and fearful all the time of being overwhelmed by opponents,” read one opinion piece in the English-language Dawn newspaper published Monday.
“This urges them to take strong-arm measures, not occasionally but incessantly.”
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said “blocking access to the capital, with motorway and highway closures across Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has effectively penalized ordinary citizens.”
The US State Department appealed for protesters to refrain from violence, while also urging authorities to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms and to ensure respect for Pakistan’s laws and constitution as they work to maintain law and order.”
Khan was ousted by a no-confidence vote after falling out with the kingmaking military establishment, which analysts say engineers the rise and fall of Pakistan’s politicians.
But as opposition leader, he led an unprecedented campaign of defiance, with PTI street protests boiling over into unrest that the government cited as the reason for its crackdown.
PTI won more seats than any other party in this year’s election but a coalition of parties considered more pliable to military influence shut them out of power.
Russia’s Medvedev warns West over discussing nuclear weapons for Ukraine
MOSCOW: Senior Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday that if the West supplied nuclear weapons to Ukraine then Moscow could consider such a transfer to be tantamount to an attack on Russia, providing grounds for a nuclear response.
The New York Times reported last week that some unidentified Western officials had suggested that US President Joe Biden could give Ukraine nuclear weapons, though there were fears such a step would have serious implications.
“American politicians and journalists are seriously discussing the consequences of the transfer of nuclear weapons to Kyiv,” Medvedev, who served as Russia’s president from 2008 to 2012, said on Telegram.
Medvedev said that even the threat of such a transfer of nuclear weapons could be considered as preparation for a nuclear war against Russia.
“The actual transfer of such weapons can be equated to the fait accompli of an attack on our country,” under Russia’s newly updated nuclear doctrine, he said.
China sends naval, air forces to shadow US plane over Taiwan Strait
- The US Navy’s 7th fleet said a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft had flown through the strait
BEIJING: China’s military said on Tuesday it deployed naval and air forces to monitor and warn a US Navy patrol aircraft that flew through the sensitive Taiwan Strait, denouncing the United States for trying to “mislead” the international community.
Around once a month, US military ships or aircraft pass through or above the waterway that separates democratically governed Taiwan from China — missions that always anger Beijing.
China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and says it has jurisdiction over the strait. Taiwan and the United States dispute that, saying the strait is an international waterway.
The US Navy’s 7th fleet said a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft had flown through the strait “in international airspace,” adding that the flight demonstrated the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.
“By operating within the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law, the United States upholds the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations,” it said in a statement.
China’s military criticized the flight as “public hype,” adding that it monitored the US aircraft throughout its transit and “effectively” responded to the situation.
“The relevant remarks by the US distort legal principles, confuse public opinion and mislead international perceptions,” the military’s Eastern Theatre Command said in a statement.
“We urge the US side to stop distorting and hyping up and jointly safeguard regional peace and stability.”
In April, China’s military said it sent fighter jets to monitor and warn a US Navy Poseidon in the Taiwan Strait, a mission that took place just hours after a call between the Chinese and US defense chiefs. (Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Additional reporting and writing by Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
Ukraine says Russia launched ‘record’ 188 drones overnight
KYIV: Russia staged a record number of drone attacks overnight over Ukraine, damaging buildings and “critical infrastructure” in several regions, the air force said Tuesday.
“During the night attack, the enemy launched a record number of Shahed strike unmanned aerial vehicles and unidentified drones,” the air force said, referring to Iranian-designed drones and putting the figure at 188.
