To combat gun violence, Minnesota law enforcement turns to ‘red flag’ law

One day in early February a Bloomington police detective got a call that a man had notified his family that he planned to shoot himself in the head The detective Matt Jones detected the man at his home where according to a Minnesota District Court filing he admitted to officers that he was planning to buy a gun this day and unfailingly inferred that when he dies it will be by his own hand Jones then took a step that is becoming increasingly common among officers in Hennepin County and to an extent throughout the state He persuaded a state court judge to stop the person with suicidal thoughts from owning or buying a gun Jones used the Extreme Pitfall Protection Order Act informally known as the red flag law or ERPO a remnant of the DFL s legislative smorgasbord which went into effect at the start of Minnesota Judicial Branch evidence shows that more ERPO petitions were filed throughout the state in the first seven months of this year than all of Also of the petitions filed through Aug just or were rejected by a state court judge Gun control is a centerstage issue following the assassination of DFL House leader Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman Related Minnesota likely knew nothing of Boelter s gun arsenal and that s the law Gov Tim Walz is open to metal detectors at the Capitol Meanwhile the state Supreme Court has cast doubt on the legitimacy of a state statute banning certain guns without serial numbers And a document distributed this month identified that Minnesota gun deaths climbed in from the year prior Amid this scrutiny ERPO has quietly gained steam as a tool to prevent further tragedies If you read any of the Hennepin County petitions you will be thankful this law exists revealed Rana Alexander assistant attorney at Hennepin County I feel confident that they have saved particular lives Here is what we know about ERPO s impact on citizens safety and taking away Minnesotans guns How does this law work If you think that someone in your family or household poses a threat to themselves or someone else you can petition a judge to take away that person s gun and stop them from buying a new firearm You can also ask law enforcement to write the petition on your behalf There is an urgency petition for taking away someone s access to guns for two weeks and there s a petition to remove access for a year For the latter the defendant can hire a lawyer and argue why they should still be able to possess a firearm In the Bloomington example the city s police department petitioned for both a two-week and year-long order Within an hour of the filing Judge Charlene Hatcher granted the exigency request literally checking a box stating that respondent has made prior suicide attempts or has a serious mental illness Hatcher scheduled a Zoom court hearing for days later on the year-long ban At that hearing the respondent did not mount a legal defense and a different judge Theresa Couri granted the -month petition The Bloomington development tracks with statewide implementation Of the cases reviewed or of petitions were filed by law enforcement as opposed to a concerned family or household member And in or of these cases an urgency order and a one-year ban order was granted Minnesota is the st state to adopt an ERPO law according to the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at John Hopkins University When it comes to the number of cases filed the fact that police officers or sheriffs bring forth preponderance of the petitions and that the filings mostly succeed in court Minnesota is pretty average compared to other states disclosed Spencer Cantrell an assistant scientist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Populace Wellbeing I initially planned to use this quote as the article s headline but my editor nixed it Where things get a lot more engaging is the accelerating circumstance rate Why are the number of petitions on the rise Because there is growing buy-in from police Last year Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty hired Alexander away from Standpoint a St Paul-based social services group for survivors of domestic violence With Hennepin County Alexander has one job Advise police officers on the filing of ERPO petitions The law was so new that nobody knew about it Alexander reported Alexander does a lot of training and technical assistance I m speaking with officers who might say Hey let me run this situation past you or I m trying to e-file the ERPO Help me figure it out In Hennepin County there were ERPO petitions filed in In the first seven months of there have been filings In recent days Moriarty made a second hire Bridget Liverca to focus on cases that domestic violence survivors and other private individuals want to file Alexander meanwhile continues to work with police According to Rick Hodson general counsel for the Minnesota Sheriffs Association there was similar training in Blue Earth and Waseca counties the counties with the highest per capita ERPO petitions Hodson met on Zoom and IRL with county law enforcement providing a blow-by-blow in how the process works for the retrieval and transfer of weapons To be clear there is not ERPO enthusiasm throughout the state In of Minnesota s counties not a single petition has been filed But law enforcement s broader concerns about the law have not come to pass One worry had been that unlike the issuing of several warrants the respondent in an ERPO petition knows ahead of time police are paying a visit If you are going to a farm and taking away a bunch of guns from a long driveway there s the threat of an ambush explained James Stuart executive director of the Minnesota Sheriff s Association But the sheriff s association reports not a single safety matter stemming from ERPO law enforcement That s nice and all that law enforcement is warming to this red flag law But what do gun owners think And what evidence is there that this works Gun owners worry the law short circuits due process Although the law was sold as a tool for families in predicament in practice it s predominantly police-driven and circumvents seizures that would have otherwise required a warrant explained Rob Doar senior vice president of leadership affairs for the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus Also it s not clear in specific cases why judges made the decisions they did Counties and reporters have described instances where removals allegedly averted harm while sealed filings and records limit a comprehensive auditing of errors Doar announced Doar s criticism drives at the dilemma of red flag gun laws The statute s logic exists in a Phillip K Dick world of confiscating a weapon before the crime can occur So how do we know the law makes a difference It is hard to prove a negative noted Cantrell at the Center for Gun Violence Solutions Nonetheless Cantrell and her Johns Hopkins colleagues have curated material showing that ERPO has worked in states that have had such laws on the books for decades For example a Duke University research estimated that Connecticut s law was associated with a drop in firearm suicides while Indiana s measure lead to an decline in suicides there For every - ERPO issued in these two states one suicide was prevented Related Midwest Boys and Girls Club Youth of the Year is a podcaster gun safety advocate from St Paul s West Side One startling nugget from the Duke inquiry was that for each red flag operation officers recovered on average seven guns from the subject Hodson commented that to his knowledge a large number of Minnesota ERPO cases have involved multiple guns No one really knows how multiple guns are floating about in Minnesota As of the end of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension released valid gun permits Maggly Emery executive director of gun control group Protect Minnesota mentioned the state is low in gun deaths compared to gun ownership levels Still Protect Minnesota circulated a evaluation showing that in statewide gun deaths ticked up to total While we are low in terms of pro capita gun deaths every day one or two people in Minnesota died because of guns Emery disclosed Every single one of them was preventable The post To combat gun violence Minnesota law enforcement turns to red flag law appeared first on MinnPost