Part 1 - Mr. Smith
Goes to City Hall
Last year, the city saw an exodus of staff in two of its
newest divisions, the office of race, equity and inclusion and the office of
performance and innovation, now called The Department of Performance Management
and Innovation. Both lost all their staff in 2023.
One of those who left in 2023 was Brian K. Smith.
In 2016 Smith went from being an outsider fighting city hall
to becoming the Director of the new city division aimed at innovation and equity,
started by then-mayor Besty Hodges.
That ended last year, following a controversial city
coordinator appointment, a discrimination complaint, and a lawsuit he and
others filed against the city.
On July 7, 2023, just a few weeks after retiring from his position working in City Hall, I met with Smith and talked with him about his experience there.
He didn’t expect to get the job when he was hired by
Hodges.
“She knew me just like most of the other council members,”
said Smith. “Which is why I was surprised when I actually got a job because I
would be down there harassing council members for the most part on behalf of
community members about policies and practices.”
“I knew people but based on the pushing and fighting for folks
in neighborhood and residents,” said Smith. “I had no idea that when they came
and asked if I would be interested in that job that I would actually get it.
Smith also served as an alternate to the community mediation
team helping oversee the first federal agreement with police department and as a
program director with the Bridge for Run Away Youth during a controversial, but
ultimately successful, expansion.
He stepped into the position at a challenging time for the
division. “At that time the office had
gone from a team of 7 down to a team of one,” he said.
They functioned as an in-house consulting team that,
according to the city’s website “helps the City address complex and pressing
challenges that lead to racial disparities,” and to “develop new solutions that
move the dial toward equity in Minneapolis.”
They managed a minimum wage study which ultimately led to
the city setting its own minimum wage, started a small business navigator
program, led with the redrafting of a “conduct on premises” rental license
ordinance and helped establish the Behavioral Crisis Response teams as a fourth
response to emergencies.
What follows is the first of two columns dedicated to
telling Smith’s story, in his own words.
Building A New Division
“I'm proud of everything we did.” Said Smith. “I think there
are some things that stick out more than others because of the impact that it
may have had for residents that people can see touch and feel. That was the
small business team that was created out of our work, that was the Behavioral
Crisis Response Teams (BCR), the conduct on premises rental license ordinance amendments.”
“Internally I think we did a lot to help people understand
how to use data, how to make strategic plans, how to constantly look at your
program and evaluate whether your living up to your mission and vision of your
department or your division and to actually come to the innovation team or
other people if you have a contract that you can do with other people, to say
how can we make something that we had a person who was smart enough to do but
nobody listened to I don't want and one aspect and that's continuous
improvement which is Jodie who is actually pretty brilliant and hard-working
but nobody listened to.”
“We were able to set a culture in the city, to a degree, where
people would constantly look at their performance in their department and we
built a performance management process which the city never had and we had
results which was a good attempt and a start, but as we took that we had that
evolved into a more robust performance management system when you tied goals city
goals, department goals to attempting the tie it to the budget and things like
that but really making people look at training people and working with people
so that they could a look at the mission and vision of their department and division
and then see whether or not they’re measuring up.”
Being Trusted and Objective
“The good thing about the way I think it worked in the
beginning was, we didn't get stressed out with staff directions or overwhelmed with
staff directions. We didn't get overwhelmed
with Betsy, when she talked to me she just said, “Hey, we trust that you are
able to do the job, we trust that your staff are really smart and hard-working
and so we just want you to just look at the policies and practices around the
city, listen to community members, mostly residents of the city, and if there's
things that you find are things that people are interested in, take deeper dive
into it and see if it grows into something and just keep me informed.”
“She wasn't heavy-handed,” said Smith. “We knew what her
policy objectives were and what her platform was, but she trusted us to look at
those things that you guys had as council, that she had as a mayor and listen
to residents to see what will be the most pressing thing that we needed to
address. Not what was more politically
expedient.”
“Sometime some council members would ask for some stuff and
it would ruffle some feathers of other the council members, or ruffle feathers of
the department heads, because we did our very best to be objective.” Said
Smith, “Our job we thought was to find information, inform people so they can
make it informed decisions and then it lands where it lands because we're human
too and we have a lot of ideas about how things might turn out or how things
should turn out, but what we had to do was follow the prescriptive method that
we adopted and some of the stuff that we developed to make sure that we didn't
let our attitude, our opinions and you know our own experiences get in the way
of what actually needed to happen to serve residents better.”
“The only time it would get extremely challenging is when
there were people on the inside who had way more authority than us, who wanted
to dictate to people how things should be, as opposed to listening to and
working with them. By people I mean the residents, like I know what's best for
you so we had some electric officials who like them and we have a mayor who's
like that now, so it made it extremely difficult for us because people were
trying to guide our work or ask the question and guide us towards the answer
that they wanted us to have. That’s why
we wouldn't use certain researchers because there are some researchers in town
who you can tell them what you want the outcome to be and they will gladly take
your money and give you that outcome. So that also presented a challenge
sometimes because some elected officials were used to holding things as a
genuine question like they had genuine interests, but they already had their
mind made up and if we didn't go along with it, it was hell for me to pay. I protected my staff, but it was hell for me
to pay from time to time.”
“Everybody felt a little bit of relief in knowing that this
was this new body of folks in the city that weren't completely caught up in the
everyday politics of everything and actually took pride in just been as
objective as they possibly could in giving the information.”
“We could be that liaison, we could be that technical
assistance provider, we could be that support not only for residents but also
for departments and elected leadership in the city. And I didn't know what would come of it, but I
knew that's what I was going to go there and try my best to do. Maybe it was
timing, but it seemed like that's what a majority of elected officials wanted. Residents definitely wanted it. Department heads were more leery than people
think, partly because it would have been the first time where somebody would be
telling a story about that shot other than them, but I would say over the years we got to a
place where the majority, not a heavy majority, but a majority of the
departments in the city knew that our would do nothing but help them, even
though some of them still feared a process sometimes pulled the cover off of
things in order to shed light on it, not embarrass anybody, but to shed light
on it and so that we can see where we need to make improvement and for some
people that was extremely scary. Scary because they knew it would mean change, some
scary because they were doing some shit they shouldn't have been doing, and
they thought it would create a level accountability, that just didn't exist in
the city for departments.”
What A Difference A Mayor Makes.
In 2017 Hodges was not reelected. Jacob Frey became mayor
and, said Smith, “for the most part the appreciation of the work was gone and I
never met with Jacob once. I met with
Betsy every 2 weeks. …but the only time
I ever met with Jacob was one budget meeting and whenever I was bringing a
national conference into town where he would be speaking. I've never had one
meeting with Jacob about our work in five years, not one, he wasn't interested.”
Part 2 Mr. Smith Leaves City Hall
In the fall of 2022, Smith seemed to be thriving in his role
as Director of the Office of Performance and Innovation (OPI) for the City of
Minneapolis. In October he had won a Pollen 50 over 50 “disruptor of the status
quo” award for his work as one of the “most inspiring and accomplished
leaders from across the state.”
In the award announcement, and elsewhere, he was noted for helping
transform public safety in Minneapolis. The work he led examining the city’s
911 emergency response resulted in the establishment of the acclaimed unarmed
Behavioral Crisis Response (BCR) program that has received national as well as
local recognition. Smith and his team also created an overnight parking enforcement
program so that police didn't have to respond to parking calls at night and a
change to transfer theft and report-only calls from 911 to 311.
Smith resigned 7 months later after he had testified against
the appointment of a City Coordinator, formally complained about discrimination
within the city, and filed a lawsuit against the city.
Through the settlement discussion over the lawsuit, the city
offered to pay him to leave. He agreed, and resigned effective June 23, 2023.
“I was about to go anyway,” said Smith. “I was tired. I had
other options.” He said that the work had gotten so stressful that he took an unplanned
leave because of “how toxic the place got.”
“I knew I wasn't appreciated. I knew our work wasn't
appreciated,” he said. “It was just a bad environment for people who really wanted
to serve residents. It was a super bad environment for black people.”
“All of the black folks who were in any position of leadership,
those who went along with the status quo, as well as those who didn’t, are gone,”
said Smith. “Anybody who was trying to do anything to change the status quo and
make the city live up to what it says and writes on paper but doesn’t do,
they’ll all gone.”
Concerns, especially among black employees, became very
public in May of 2022 when a group of former and current staff from the city coordinator’s
office held a press conference opposing the appointment of Heather Johnston,
who was interim City Coordinator at the time, for a 4-year term. Many of them were supervised by Smith, who was
himself supervised by Johnston. Johnston
has since also resigned.
In a letter shared at the time, 17 current and former city
staff, many who worked in the division Smith directed, outlined concerns and a
“toxic, anti-Black work culture that has been perpetuated by past and current
City Coordinators, both Interim and appointed, for several years.” “City leaders,” they wrote, “claim to uphold
values of racial equity and justice and acknowledged racism as a public health
crisis. However, these claims have failed to result in tangible actions that
substantially support employees, especially Black employees.”
“To be a director, your job is not only to supervise, give
your staff the resources and the tools they need and support they need to do a
great job, it’s also your job to make sure that they come to work and be their
full selves,” said Smith. “So, when they took the time to organize, to speak
out and to do all those things, to have no black folks in leadership at
the city say anything, what do you think that says for that group of people? How
vulnerable and long-suffering do we expect people to be? To have no director stand
up would have been pretty much everybody in the city's saying, you’re on
your own.”
“I wasn't planning on going up there.” He added, “I did it
because everything they said was true and I experienced it daily.”
“I felt compelled to get up and say this is really
happening, this is very personal. You have people getting sick, scared at work,
feeling like they are going to be retaliated against, not getting raises, not
getting promotions, getting fired, getting disciplined.”
Despite being assured publicly at the hearing that there
would be no retaliation against anyone who testified, when asked if there was
retaliation, Smith said “Yes, constant. They did it. I got a letter of reprimand maybe 2 months
after and it included all the stuff from when I spoke out.”
Concerns about racial discrimination were perhaps most
evident in the work he and his team did with 911 which ultimately resulted in
the discrimination lawsuit Smith and Gina Obiri filed against the city. Obiri worked with Smith in the OPI.
Many complaints focused on Kathy Hughes, the 911 director at
the time, who has since resigned her position with the city.
“When we were building the BCR, she refused to let us meet
with her staff. She refused to give us any data. She refused to cooperate at
meetings,” said Smith. “She would make racist statements directly to us, she
would make them directly to other white people about us and the city about us, and
that's just the tip of the iceberg.”
The lawsuit argued that “Beginning in late 2019 and for well
over a year, Hughes, a White woman, discriminated against Plaintiffs because of
their race, treating Plaintiffs with hostility and denigration, falsely
accusing Plaintiffs of lying, criticizing and undermining them in front of City
staff and residents, refusing to meet with them, and refusing to provide them
access to information necessary to perform their jobs….Hughes treated White
employees in a dramatically different, respectful fashion.
In one example, the lawsuit states that Hughes “demonstrated
anti-Black bias, including openly questioning whether the majority-Black staff
on the OPI team would be able to pass a criminal background check.”
Despite raising the issue to her supervisors and the city’s
human resources department through what Smith calls “constant emails,” he said,
“nobody did anything for almost a year.”
Smith concluded that many people in City Hall think that “Black
people are expendable.” “Everybody
thinks we are built for long suffering, and they are so used to seeing people
suffering they just think that that’s the way it is.”
“My size ended up in my 360 [work performance] review,” he
said, quoting from memory one of the comments, “Brian has to realize that he is
physically intimidating to some people, he’s a larger black man so he should
learn how to….”
“Oh, it’s real,” Smith said of a racist, toxic work
environment in City Hall. “If the pressure that came after George Floyd being
murdered and other murders after that, the DOJ [Department of Justice], State
Human Rights, 100 million dollars in lawsuits, and the pressure that has
built up in this community, if that is not enough to make change, I’m not sure
what will.”
About the BCR service he helped create, Smith said, “what
they need to do is to continue to let the innovation team manage it until they
straighten out the things they need to straighten out in the office of
community safety and the police department. To put it in precincts would be a huge
mistake.”
“Alternatives should be built, the same way we built the
last one. They should be piloted, and
they should be set up in a way that shows that people are serious about
transforming public safety.”
Looking ahead, Smith said, “My concern inside the city is
that people who truly want to be public servants will continue to leave, which
means the level of service that the residents deserve and pay for, will go down.”
“My concern is for residents. It can take a long time to undo some of the prejudice
that is at play. The stuff that is
embedded in our culture about race, about class, about who deserves service and
who doesn’t, that’s so embedded it takes years to try to get at it.”
“The people in this city have dealt with enough pain and deserve
better.”
Note: - a version of this was also published in the Southside Pride newspaper.
