[ The city will decide on a sweeping measure that would limit the
size, scope and influence of its police department.]
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'THE WORLD IS LOOKING AT US": MINNEAPOLIS PUTS 'DEFUND THE POLICE' TO
A VOTE  
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Maya King
September 22, 2021
Politico
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_ The city will decide on a sweeping measure that would limit the
size, scope and influence of its police department. _

Demonstrators march in Minneapolis, as protests continued following
the death of George Floyd on May 31, 2020., Julio Cortez/AP Photo

 

The “defund the police“ movement got its start in Minneapolis last
year. It might meet its end there in November.

Minneapolis voters will decide then whether to adopt an amendment to
the city’s charter that would limit the size, scope and influence of
its police department, a first-of-its-kind measure sparked by the
2020 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek
Chauvin. The mayor who would help spearhead those reforms is also on
the ballot: incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey, who is facing a slate of
nearly 20 challengers, including several leaders of last summer’s
protests for police accountability in the wake of Floyd’s death.

 

The amendment — and, to a lesser extent, the mayoral race — will
provide the first ballot test of a big-city police department
overhaul in advance of the midterm elections. Those in favor of
sweeping police reforms also see the amendment’s outcome as a gauge
of just how much political capital defund movement activists have left
against the backdrop of a spike in violent crime.

 

Democrats have been divided nationally over whether the push to
“defund the police” seriously damaged their electoral prospects in
2020 or had no effect at all. It’s a debate happening in nearly
every big city in America.

“After George Floyd, the world literally turned its eye to
Minneapolis. The pressure was on,” said Robin Wonsley Worlobah, a
community organizer and candidate for City Council. “Really, we're
seeing what legacy are we creating in the wake of George Floyd. What
are we going to do about the future of public safety? Because what we
do here, we know will impact other cities.”

Under the Yes 4 Minneapolis initiative, the Minneapolis Police
Department would be replaced with a Department of Public Safety,
eliminating the city’s required minimum number of officers per
capita and replacing some with social workers, mental health experts
and crisis managers — effectively defunding the local police by
reallocating funds to other city services.

[Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey speaks at a press conference. ]

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey speaks at a press conference about public
safety on April 19, 2021 in St. Paul, Minn. | Stephen Maturen/Getty
Images

The City Council and the mayor would share oversight of the new
department, deciding the scope of the role police officers — who
would be newly classified as “peace officers” — would play.
These changes would mark a significant check on the mayor’s power,
as Frey currently has total control of the department’s funding,
staffing and leadership.

 

Advocates for the measure view the dramatic revamping as a necessity
— one that predates Floyd’s death. For starters, the city’s
charter amendment mandating a minimum number of police officers has
been in place for 60 years. And, pointing to the 2015 shooting death
of Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old Black man, and the 2016 shooting of
Philando Castile in nearby St. Anthony, those pushing the amendment
note that the groundwork for the protests against law enforcement
tactics last summer was laid well in advance.

In April, the Justice Department said it would pursue a pattern or
practice investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department after
the murder of George Floyd. The DOJ will focus on the department’s
use of force patterns and assess whether it disproportionately targets
Black and brown residents.

Despite that backdrop, Democrats in the overwhelmingly liberal city
— and across the state — aren’t universally supportive of the
amendment. Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. Amy Klobuchar both oppose the
amendment
[[link removed]],
criticizing it as too far-reaching in the face of rising crime rates
in the city and too ill-defined to be successful.

Walz told the Minneapolis Star Tribune
[[link removed]] in
August that the amendment was better suited as a statewide ballot
initiative, rather than one unique to Minneapolis.

Frey, who is running for his second term as mayor, also opposes the
ballot measure. In his view, the provision that would place the power
to reform — or abolish — the police in the hands of the City
Council is particularly problematic.

“When everybody's in charge, nobody's in charge,” Frey said in an
interview. “I think that would dramatically diminish accountability.
It would reduce clarity of command.”

Frey has expressed support for aspects of the amendment that allow
social workers and mental health experts to respond to some
emergencies. But he offers his own plan for law enforcement
[[link removed]] changes
that remakes the police department from the inside, via peer-to-peer
training and more stringent use of force guidelines.

[Black Lives Matter displayed]

Numerous Black Lives Matter banners were on display in the aftermath
of the Derek Chauvin verdict. | Morry Gash/AP Photo

The mayor said his views on police reform were informed by heavy input
from Black and brown residents of Minneapolis, many of whom have been
supportive of police reform efforts but remain wary of the notion of
defunding or abolishing the police. And Frey has been quick to tout
his record of supporting reform, citing a 40 percent jump in use of
body cameras and ban on warrior-style training for officers both on
and off duty during his tenure.

“There's a ton of changes that have been made,” Frey said of
Minneapolis’ approach to policing in the aftermath of Floyd’s
death. “Now, they're specific, they're technical. And you can't fit
them into a hashtag.”

Bill Rodriguez, an ally of Frey’s administration, co-founded the
group Operation Safety Now last summer to oppose the movement to
defund the police. Now that the ballot amendment has gained steam, his
group has renewed political fervor.

“There's very few people, not only in this town, but I think across
the country, that would be against police reform, that would be
against denying that there has been some systemic racism,” Rodriguez
said. “I think what they want, though, is well-thought-through
public policy that actually has been well-defined and well-conceived.
And that's not the case of what we're seeing here in Yes 4
Minneapolis.”

Activists have dismissed Frey’s reforms as too piecemeal and
rejected the criticisms of Yes 4 Minneapolis as fear-mongering.
Pro-amendment organizers have sought to make clear that they do not
aim to abolish the city’s police department_ _— the Yes 4
Minneapolis website [[link removed]] (recently
rebranded as "Yes on 2" to reflect the amendment's placement on the
ballot) states that the amendment neither abolishes nor defunds the
police.

“People want to have these debates about
‘defund-versus-not-defund, or ‘defund-or-pro-cop. Those are such
mischaracterizations of the actual conversations about what this
charter change does,” said JaNaé Bates, an organizer and
spokesperson for Yes 4 Minneapolis. “If you say, ‘defund the
police’ to 10 different people, you will get 10 different responses
about what that actually means.”

Replacing the current structure with a Department of Public Safety,
Bates said, would rid the city of an outdated model and more fully
protect communities from crime by allowing more experts to respond to
emergencies that may not always require law enforcement.

Activists who support Yes 4 Minneapolis say the current version of the
amendment makes clear how a new Department of Public Safety would
operate under the purview of the City Council.

“Community members have been calling for this solution to be able to
expand public safety for decades. And they always run up against the
same brick wall as to why they can't do it,” Bates said. “This is
how we remove that brick wall.”

In their efforts to win support for the ballot amendment, activists
have tried to draw a direct correlation between Frey’s leadership
and the outsize role that law enforcement plays in Minneapolis.
Hundreds of activists booed him out of a rally in 2020 after he
rejected demands to defund the Minneapolis police. He
ultimately increased the police budget
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the city for the 2021 fiscal year, replenishing the department’s
funding to its levels before Floyd’s killing.

They see the election’s timing — roughly 18 months after Floyd’s
killing — as an opportunity to make the election a referendum on
both Frey’s mayoral tenure and the future of policing in
Minneapolis.

“I believe it's critical that our decision makers have seen what
it's like in the streets,” said Sheila Nezhad, an organizer who
helped lead protests last summer and is now among the top challengers
to Frey, carrying endorsements from Run for Something and
Minnesota’s Young Democratic Farmer Labor party. “Mayor Frey has
probably never choked on tear gas.”

Earlier unsuccessful efforts to overhaul the city police department
underscore the tumultuous politics — and confusion — surrounding
the ballot amendment. In June 2020, a majority of city councilmembers
signed a pledge to dismantle the police department but the initiative
fizzled by September after a number of them backed away from their
pledges
[[link removed]].

While activists were calling for defunding and abolishing police, some
council members interpreted their demands to mean they merely wanted
to reallocate portions of police funding to community initiatives.

“We were responding to what we were hearing from constituents, we
were responding to cries for something more transformational than
what's been promised in the past,” said Lisa Bender, the outgoing
City Council president who supports the ballot amendment. She added
that the council was "stepping into a leadership void" created by
Frey's administration.

Simply getting the amendment on the ballot this fall has been half the
battle: It was challenged in Minnesota courts before its final
clearance on Thursday by the state Supreme Court.

Jeremiah Ellison, son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, is
a council member running for reelection in Ward 5, one of
Minneapolis’ predominantly Black neighborhoods. He said his
constituents have expressed concern about his support for the
amendment. Police reform is necessary, they argue — a sentiment
held by a majority of Black Americans
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but a major overhaul of policing is a bridge too far for many of them.

“You have all these people in the middle, who just want to see their
neighborhood improve, who just want to see their neighbors safe,”
Ellison said. Many of his constituents are “sort of stuck in the
middle [of] having to decide between, ‘am I going to listen to the
people giving me a lot of nuance? Or am I going to listen to the
people who are scaring the hell out of me?’ And, you know, fear is
quite a motivator.”

Many worry that the first failed “defund” attempt last year was a
sign that the Black Lives Matter movement is losing ground, as
evidenced by the downtick in public sentiment toward the movement. In
June, a majority of Americans expressed the belief that BLM protests
for police accountability achieved little effective change
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But those perceptions are not the only hurdle to passage of the
amendment. Several opposition groups have poured thousands of dollars
into advertising campaigns against the measure and also into the war
chests of like-minded candidates.

And amendment organizers’ continued struggles to clarify what the
amendment would mean in practice have made it difficult to make the
case for overhauling the police in the face of a steep uptick in crime
in Minneapolis. Canvassers for the Yes 4 Minneapolis initiative said
they have met with some resistance from voters.

Amendment supporters blame the confusion on misinformation campaigns
tied to organizations opposed to Yes 4 Minneapolis. Educating and
turning out voters, those supporters say, is their chief focus in the
final month before the Nov. 2 vote.

“The power has always been there. The only difference now is the
world is looking at us and seeing how we’re moving forward,”
Worlobah said. “Or are we going to move backwards?”

_Maya King is a politics reporter at POLITICO, where she writes about
the intersection of race and politics.  She has previously held
positions at NPR, USA Today and the Democracy Fund. She is a
Tallahassee native and graduate of Howard University, where she
studied journalism and Spanish._

 

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