I’m not a religious person but if I could point to a person that has guided me through life it would be Mr. Rogers. As the children’s TV icon often told interviewers, his mom taught him as a child to always look for the helpers during tough times. “Look for the helpers” can be a comforting phrase as Minneapolis wades through, well, a lot.

When I observed a police officer interacting with a driver last week, I couldn’t stop thinking about the lost opportunity that officer had to be a helper. Even in a brief moment of traffic confusion.

Fire trucks and police cars were leaving the scene of a house fire just south of Hennepin Avenue. As I crossed Hennepin Avenue at 26th Street, a police officer navigating the street as a driver got on his overhead speaker and said “move your car” to the driver in front of him. Looking at the situation, I assumed the driver was not sure how to navigate the intersection that was marked with construction vehicles, lingering fire trucks, and police cars on the sidewalk at Sencha Tea Bar

A fire truck parked on Hennepin Avenue south of 26th Street on Aug. 9. Hennepin Avenue is currently under construction and has one lane open to vehicles on this block. Photo by Melody Hoffmann

Announcing to the driver to “move your car” from their car seemed like the least helpful statement to make over a loudspeaker at that moment and in 2024. The Minneapolis Police Department is under national scrutiny and community trust is low among many people in this city. The City of Minneapolis is under a court enforceable agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights for documented misbehavior of its police officers.

One of the key improvements in the agreement is for police officers to work on building community with residents, especially in small, simple moments.

“Community members continued to turn back to the importance of reciprocal relationships to develop a level of trust and understanding necessary to shift culture,” reads the Minnesota Justice Research Center’s community engagement report on the consent decree.  

Telling the driver to turn right on 26th Street would have been helpful. Even getting out of the car to engage with the driver rather than shouting over a loudspeaker would be a huge step, and one that we should be expecting from the Minneapolis Police Department.

“If you look for the helpers, you know that there’s hope,” Rogers said in a Television Academy Foundation interview. I want that to be true of the helpers in our city, but that isn’t what I saw last week.