Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Minneapolis voters shun replacing police
MINNEAPOLIS — Minneapolis voters Tuesday rejected a proposal to replace the city’s Police Department with a Department of Public Safety, an idea that supporters had hoped would bring radical change to policing in the city where George Floyd’s death under an officer’s knee brought calls for racial justice.
With 98% of the precincts reporting, the vote was 44% yes to 56% no.
The initiative would have changed the city charter to remove a requirement that the city have a Police Department with a minimum number of officers.
Supporters said a complete overhaul of policing was necessary to stop police violence. Opponents said the proposal had no concrete plan for how to move forward and warned that it would leave some communities already affected by violence more vulnerable with crime on the rise.
The ballot proposal had roots in the abolish-the-police movement that started after Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer last year. The debate over racial justice in policing drew national attention to Tuesday’s vote, as well as a river of out-of-state money seeking to influence the outcome that could have shaped change elsewhere as well.
The ballot question called for a new Department of Public Safety to take “a comprehensive public health approach to the delivery of functions” that would be determined by the mayor and City Council. The new department “could include” police officers “if necessary, to fulfill its responsibilities for public safety.”
Supporters argued that it was a chance to reimagine what public safety can be and how money gets spent. Among other things, supporters said, funding would go toward programs that don’t send armed officers to call on people in crisis.
Meanwhile, Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey was in a tough fight for a second term, facing a bevy of opponents who attacked him for his leadership in the wake of Floyd’s death. Frey opposed the policing amendment. Two of his leading challengers in the field of 17 candidates, Sheila Nezhad and Kate Knuth, strongly supported the proposal.
With 98% of the precincts reporting, Frey had 42.8% of the vote. He needed 50% to win under the city’s rankedchoice voting system, with the city to begin sorting secondand third-place choices this morning.
Nezhad and Knuth were at 21% and 18.5%, respectively.
Minneapolis voters were also deciding whether to replace the city’s unusual “weak mayor, strong council” system with a more conventional distribution of executive and legislative powers that would give the mayor clearer authority over day-to-day government operations.
NATIONAL RECKONING
The future of policing in the city where Floyd’s death in May 2020 launched a nationwide reckoning on racial justice overshadowed everything else on the municipal ballot.
Rishi Khanna, 31, a tech worker, voted yes on replacing the Police Department, saying he doesn’t believe police officers are qualified to deal with many situations, such as mental health crises. He said he thinks having professionals equipped to deal with a range of public safety issues in the same department as law enforcement would benefit both residents and police officers.
“I understand that law enforcement will have to have a seat at the table, but I think both in our community and in communities around the country, too often law enforcement is the only seat at the table,” he said. “I don’t think that’s the right solution.”
Askari Lyons, 61, voted against the ballot initiative. A resident of the city’s largely Black north side, where violent crime runs higher than in the rest of the city, he said he believes Minneapolis police officers “may have learned a lesson after Floyd’s death and what happened to the cop that killed him.”
Lyons called it “unwise” to replace the department and said he believes change within the department is imminent.
“People are so frustrated, so angry, so disappointed” with the violence occurring citywide as much as they are with the city’s law enforcement, he said.
Two nationally prominent progressive Democratic leaders — U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents the Minneapolis area, and state Attorney General Keith Ellison — supported the policing amendment. But some leading mainstream liberals, including Gov. Tim Walz and U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, opposed it and feared the backlash could lead to Democratic losses across the country in 2022.
Support didn’t cleanly follow racial lines. Opponents included several prominent Black leaders, including some who have been top voices in the police accountability movement.
Minister JaNae Bates, a spokeswoman for the amendment campaign, told reporters Monday that even if the proposal failed, the activists behind it have changed the conversation around public safety.
“No matter what happens, the city of Minneapolis is going to have to move forward and really wrestle with what we cannot unknow: that the Minneapolis Police Department has been able to operate with impunity and has done quite a bit of harm and the city has to take some serious steps to rectify that,” Bates said.
Information for this article was contributed by Steve Karnowski and Mohamed Ibrahim of The Associated Press; and by The New York Times.
Ibrahim is a corps member of The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative, a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.