With Smith’s death, the 1,025-page report was submitted to the Crow Wing County Attorney, who made the decision not to charge last October, over four months after Smith’s homicide.Īccording to the B.C.A. The decision to charge an officer or not with anything from murder to negligence would usually be made by a county attorney with no conflict of interest in the case. This Force Investigation Unit (FIU) would produce a report but not make charging recommendations. Their mandate was to do the exclusive investigation in all aspects, taking testimony from all witnesses, gathering and analyzing all physical evidence. In order to regain public trust, a separate and independent section of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was formed, tasked with a thorough and transparent investigation whenever police used lethal force. It was never clear if those deputies were designated undercover prior to this operation, made undercover precisely for this action, or even made undercover after the Smith shooting occurred. Instead, a statement was made that they were working undercover at that time and that state law mandated they remain anonymous. The names of the two deputies who fired the fatal shots were never made public. In any case, the perceived no-body-cam policy was given for a lack of participation by the Minneapolis police in that operation and the reason that Ramsey County deputies were suspended from future work on similar task forces.
Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher described that statement as “misleading.” Several days later, a spokesperson for the Marshals maintained that their no-cam policy had recently been reversed. Marshals prohibited the use of body cams in their operations and task forces. Much is not publicly known about this incident because no body cams or vehicle cams recorded it.
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