USA TODAY International Edition
In Minneapolis, change comes too slow for many
Mayor, council feud over how to improve policing
MINNEAPOLIS – Two weeks after George Floyd, a Black man, died under the knee of white police officer Derek Chauvin, City Council members stood in Powderhorn Park and made a promise: In response to protesters’ calls, they would dismantle the city’s police department and create a public safety system.
That would have made Minneapolis the nation’s largest experiment in replacing traditional policing with social services and public safety measures – an attempt to address root causes of crime and build a bridge between cops and a wary Black community.
That hasn’t happened. Rivals in city government blame one another for not going far enough to reform policing, even as attorneys for Floyd’s family praised some steps taken.
Mayor Jacob Frey said the council “made a pledge in front of the entire nation to abolish and defund the police department and now seems to be scapegoating others for their failure to do so.”
Council members said Frey blocked them from changing police culture and practices.
There are fewer cops on the street, but that’s mostly because of the pandemic and officers who quit, retired or took leave after the protests and violence that followed Floyd’s death.
After crime rates went up, Frey asked for more money for the police department.
Some of the council members who stood with activists carrying banners declaring, “DEFUND POLICE” have distanced themselves from the slogan, saying they don’t want to eliminate the police department.
They talk about a radically different approach to public safety: less money for armed officers, more money for mental health and social services.
The police chief answers to the mayor, not the council, and critics said Frey has signed on to only incremental changes.
“We as a council are pursuing a transformation,” said Minneapolis City Council Member Phillipe Cunningham. “And we have a mayor who is seeking reform” of the traditional policing system.
At the state and city level, chokeholds have been banned. The city outlawed “no- knock” warrants in most situations. The city and state overhauled guidelines on use of force.
“Toothless,” said Julia Decker, policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota. “There have been a few almost aspirational goals, but there’s no teeth behind them.”
She pointed to the state ban on chokeholds, hogtying and transporting people face- down unless deadly force is authorized. That law “doesn’t really mean a lot because it doesn’t truly ban chokeholds,” Decker said. “It just makes explicit that chokeholds and similar restraints constitute ‘ deadly force,’ which officers can be authorized to use in circumstances that we still feel are too broad.”
Reforming or reimagining?
Frey and Police Chief Medaria Arradondo approved new policies in the wake of Floyd’s death. Among them:
h Preventing officers from viewing body- camera footage before finishing initial reports in violent or escalating situations.
h Adding incentives for police recruits to live in the city and do social service work to help build trust.
h Preventing officers at crime scenes involving police from speaking with a union representative.
Before Floyd died, the city banned “warrior- style training” for officers, eliminating department credit for the aggressive training approach that critics said frames policing in an usversus- them mindset that leads cops to escalate confrontations.
After Floyd died, lawmakers banned departments from authorizing that training, though Decker said there’s nothing to stop officers in departments outside Minneapolis from seeking it on their own time.
Cunningham said the changes are like “slapping some colored paint on the walls while the foundation is still crumbling underneath.”
Real change, he said, will happen only when the policing structure is upended and replaced with a new public safety system.
That’s the core of the “defund” movement. Police respond to all manner of calls, including people in mental health crises, complaints related to homelessness, health emergencies, family fights, arson, rapes, assaults and shootings.
Cunningham and other council members want to build up social services and violence prevention programs to deal with the poverty, health issues and crime that plague some neighborhoods.
On that point, he said, there is a “fundamental misalignment” between the council and the mayor’s office.
“I would pose the question right back to the council members,” Frey said in response to critics. “What, in terms of reform and specific policy changes, do they want me to do that I either have not done or I’m refusing to do?”
He continued, “There are two issues that we disagree on: defunding the police or abolishing the police” and shifting power over police from the mayor’s office.
Defunding dies in Minneapolis
Hours after Floyd died on Memorial Day, a bystander’s video went viral on social media. People took to the streets the next day to protest the death of another unarmed Black man in police custody. Over the next several nights, parts of the city were vandalized, looted and burned.
Chauvin was fired; he is on trial, charged with second- and third- degree murder and second- degree manslaughter. Three other officers involved were fired and face charges of aiding and abetting those crimes.
In June, council members boasted they had a veto- proof majority to disband the force and replace it with a public safety system.
By fall, crime was up 25%, driven by big jumps in car burglaries and shootings. City revenue was down because of the pandemic. Frey threatened to hold up the city budget if the council slashed police department funding.
The council and mayor’s office agreed to cut $ 12 million from the police department to balance the books, City Council President Lisa Bender said.
The council shifted an additional $ 8 million from the department’s $ 176 million budget to other public safety efforts, such as violence prevention specialists.
A proposal to cut the maximum size of the force, 888 officers, by 15% was killed by a 7- 6 vote under Frey’s threat of a full budget veto.
The City Council managed to get a measure approved to let voters decide on an alternative to the police department, but an oversight commission blocked it from appearing on the November ballot. A similar effort is underway to allow a citywide vote this fall.
The proposal would give the council some control over the police department and lower the mandated number of officers per resident. Frey opposes it, saying the department should report only to him.
In December, Bender tweeted that Frey “fought us every step of the way” as the council tried to fund mental health, prevent gun violence and free officers from dealing with parking complaints and basic incident reports.
“When we look around the country,” she told USA TODAY, “there are a lot of mayors doing that work. And here in Minneapolis, the mayor has not been supportive of that approach.”
Frey said his administration undertook a “litany of reforms,” before and after Floyd’s death, to better train officers to deal with Black and other minority communities and to calm situations before they get out of hand. As the council pressed for alternatives to policing, Frey asked for more money for the department. In February, the city announced it would spend $ 6.4 million to recruit officers to deal with the crime increase and the loss of about 200 officers.
Critics point to state law
Decker said there are shortcomings in a new “duty to intercede” law that requires officers to break up situations that escalate because of another officer’s actions. The law doesn’t do enough to ensure that cops will report on other cops, she said. “It was a step in the right direction, but there wasn’t really as strong of an enforcement mechanism or disciplinary mechanism as we would have liked.”
State Rep. Carlos Mariani, a member of the Democratic- Farmer- Labor ( DFL) who represents part of St. Paul, said he understands the frustration.
“It shouldn’t take the killing of our citizens for us to have in place a workable accountability system,” said Mariani, chairman of the House Public Safety and Criminal Justice Reform Finance and Policy Committee. Last week, a coalition of community activist groups held a news conference calling on the governor, the state Legislature and City Council to support nine bills that would increase police transparency and accountability.