MINNEAPOLIS — It's the kind of episode that often goes unreported in the media, because it ended without shots fired. But what happened New Year's Day on the city's north side was a prime example of officers finding ways to de-escalate a tense situation.
A 33-year-old man driving a van led Minneapolis Police on a slow chase, which ended when the pursuing officers boxed him in on a dead-end street. The man kept refused to leave his van, telling officers to just leave him alone and let him go home.
But it was clear he was in some sort of a crisis.
"On a daily basis we get 9-1-1 calls where somebody believes a crime is being committed, but as we arrive and take an evaluation it’s not necessarily a crime -- we have a person in crisis who needs help," Officer Garrett Parten, a department spokesperson, told KARE.
He said the chase started after the van driver's girlfriend called 9-1-1 to say she was worried he was trying to harm her child. The child had been in the van but was no longer in the vehicle when the chase began.
"The erratic behavior of this individual caused her to call 9-1-1 because she needed help. What we’re describing is a person in crisis, who wasn’t thinking rationally."
Officers spent hours talking to the 33-year-old man, trying to convince him turn off the engine and exit the van. At times he would drive forward a few feet and then reverse, telling the officers he just wanted to go home.
At one point the van driver's father joined the officers, urging his son to surrender and leave the vehicle and comply with their orders.
What unfolded on that stretch of Irving Avenue North was consistent with the de-escalation training officers get, techniques for calming chaotic situations.
"Fairly often in a short period of time with limited information we have to make sometimes life and death decisions, but when there is time to slow down and talk and try to reason with people, we will take it," Officer Parten explained.
"One of the best tools we have is the ability to communicate, to use language, make connections with people. Every day officers are talking to people and bringing a remedy just through conversation."
In this case words alone weren't enough.
More than two hours into the standoff an officer suddenly broke a van window, so that other officers could open the door and wrestled the man out of the driver's seat. And while it was clearly traumatizing to the man being arrested, police were able gain control of him without injuries to anyone involved.
"When it’s time to control somebody that doesn’t want to be controlled, we do use physical force. A lot of training goes into the type of techniques and type of force we do use," Parten remarked.
"The goal is always to gain control with the least amount of force used and hopefully the least amount of injury used."
As his parents looked on officers and paramedics loaded the man into a waiting North Memorial ambulance. He was taken to the hospital for a medical evaluation.