Abolish the current policing model
About a month ago, I woke up to the most horrific video I have ever seen in my entire life. In that video, a resident documented a Minneapolis police officer using his body as a weapon against an innocent individual who was laying on the ground, and for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the officer took the air and life out of his body.
Shortly thereafter, nine of my colleagues and I stood together in Powderhorn Park in south Minneapolis to acknowledge and affirm that our policing system cannot be reformed. We vowed to end the current policing system as we know it and we established a clear path to create a new, transformative model for cultivating public safety. We decided that we would take on a one-year community engagement process of truth and reconciliation to give birth to this new system.
Indeed, after the killings of not only George Floyd, but also Tycel Nelson, Barbara Schneider, Fong Lee, david Smith, Terrance Franklin, Jamar Clark, Justine damond, Thurman Blevins, Travis Jordan, Fong Vue and others, we have come to a point where we all acknowledge that our current system has eroded the trust of the community to the point where it no longer functions. We acknowledged that we have a broken and outdated system that doesn’t keep our community safe and our officers safe.
As an elected official who has been on Minneapolis city council for seven years and is now the chair of public safety, I will admit that I believed in reform and I was working really hard on reform efforts until I saw them completely flushed down the drain when officer derek Chauvin used his knee — not a gun, not a billy club — to go against all of the policies that we had in place, including a directive from the chief of police, from the first African-american chief of police in the entire history of the Minneapolis Police department, to protect the sanctity of life.
Watching that video — where for eight minutes and 46 seconds that officer violated that directive and completely ignored all of the reform efforts we have been doing to diversify the workforce, to provide training that gets rid of bias in policing, to ensure that we’re having open and transparent negotiations with the police federation — all of that was thrown away in those eight minutes and 46 seconds, and that’s the moment that I became an abolitionist.
We now intend to reclaim the future of public safety and redefine and re-energize the ways that we protect each other and the ways that we keep each other safe. What we’re doing here is much, much bigger than a budget directive, than a simple language tweak on a memo. We are diving into the spiritual, mental and physical bones and architecture of how we relate to each other as a community and how we show up for each other when we need help and how we show up for each other when we decide to provide protection for one another. This is a societal project that is immense in scope.
National Post Alondra Cano is a member of the Minneapolis city council. She represents the Ninth Ward, where George Floyd was murdered. She is one of the councillors who voted to disband the Minneapolis Police Department and, as chair of public safety, is leading the charge to rebuild the city’s community safety strategy.