Minneapolis Will Disband Its Police Force, Council Members Pledge – The New York Times

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, Im Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Today, several major U.S. cities are now proposing ways to defund and even dismantle their police departments. John Eligon on the thinking behind those plans and what they might look like in practice.

Its Tuesday, June 9.

(CHANTING) I cant breathe! I cant breathe!

In the early days of the protests after George Floyd was killed

(CHANTING) No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace!

it was just pure emotions and raw rage.

[EXPLETIVE] these racist [EXPLETIVE] police!

But pretty soon, once the more fiery protests and fiery unrest died down, then we started seeing the organizers come in and talking about what they want. And one thing we quickly saw were these face masks that people were wearing. They were black, and they had yellow writing on them. And they said, Defund police.

Hmm.

And from there, you start hearing these calls at protest, at rallies.

(CHANTING) Defund the police! Defund the police!

You start hearing, Defund the police.

You start hearing calls to abolish the police. You start seeing people waving signs. And it became clear that this was an opening that a lot of activists saw to take this moment of a very brutal police killing and turn it into something much larger.

Do the right thing!

Defund the police!

So John, what do these concepts defund, dismantle, abolish the police what exactly do they mean?

To defund, when activists say that, what they mean is taking money away from the police departments budget and redirect it toward other things whether that be social services, agencies, maybe mental health agencies that can do functions that police are often called on to do.

Mm-hmm.

But if you fully defund it, you can get to a space where the police department is abolished. And so essentially, what that means is that there is no more police department as we know it. You dont call these men and women in blue shirts to come racing to your door with their guns in hand. It means that they have to figure out some other form of providing that public safety, and the police department would not be that form.

And where did these concepts come from?

Well, at their core, they come from the problems and issues that especially communities of color, especially black communities, have had with policing. They see police coming into their communities to brutalize them, not to protect and serve them. And that has really influenced this desire to keep the police away, to do something else. And weve seen, basically, that governments and police forces, they respond with certain reforms. Weve seen efforts for body cameras. Weve seen diversifying the police departments. Weve seen changes to the rules on use of force.

Mm-hmm.

But what became clear to a lot of todays activists, and what they say explicitly, is that these reforms are not working. If you look at since Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri six years ago, the police have continued to kill people at high rates, and especially black people at disproportionately high rates. And so for them, the only solution is to tear it down and build something new.

So John, what might it actually look like in practice to defund or abolish a police department?

So for instance, if someone is homeless and theyre struggling on the streets, a person can call 9-1-1, and instead of an armed police officer being sent out, perhaps there can be an outreach worker from a homeless services agency. Or if you have someone having a mental health episode, then again, you can call 9-1-1, and instead of a police officer, maybe a health care worker, a mental health worker will come out. And the idea behind it is to really cut down the interactions between armed police officers and civilians. And by doing that, the hope is that it will reduce their conflict and the potential for people getting hurt or killed by police officers.

Right. I mean, that makes a certain sense, especially for a community where theres not a lot of violent crime. But every community is different, right? And some towns, some cities I think about New York City, for example have a significantly higher rate of violent crime that would seem to require having armed police. So how do activists think about that?

For a lot of the activists that I spoke to, the issue was about centering public safety on communities. And one activist that I spoke to, Arianna Nason, she said essentially its going to be up to each community to decide what public safety looks like for itself.

Its going to be up to every community to decide what they need. We cant decide that.

So maybe thats armed patrols. Maybe thats mental health workers. Maybe thats some sort of mobile units with social workers sitting in it, and people are trained in using force and different things. One of the big ideas is this idea of community policing, community watch. And its interesting. I had said isnt an issue, though, with community policing or community patrols, neighborhood watch, that if I walk into that community, as a black man with dreadlocks, if I walk into one of these communities, we see what happens with neighborhood watch. We see Trayvon Martin. We see Ahmaud Arbery.

Should that be a concern, then? I guess with this community-type based model that certain people who look a certain way might go into the neighborhood, and that community might decide to take it into their own hands and then take it overboard, I guess.

And she took off her sunglasses. She looked at me, and she said

No, I get that. And Ill be really real with you. For me, personally, I dont have all the answers for that. I dont. And I wish I did. A lot of it is

Honestly, I dont really know the answer to that right now.

Huh.

She was not sure exactly what the answer was. And see, this is all to say, its still very tricky and very much a work in progress. But what she did say is that the current system also is not working for me either. So its a matter of what are they going to do differently? And they believe that something drastically different needs to be done.

Mm-hmm. As best you can tell, would any of the familiar elements of an existing police department Im thinking, for the sake of argument, homicide detectives, special victims units that investigate sexual assault or rape do those remain? Do they take a different form? Do they adopt a different name? Has that been fleshed out?

I would say, no, its not been fleshed out. Because again, we go back to the fact that this is not going to be some federal commission, or even state commission or a city commission for anywhere thats going to come up with, like, these are the rules for public safety now. And these are all things that need to be worked out. And I think what people say with things like homicide investigations, with sex crimes investigations and things like that, they say a couple of things. One, the police are not doing a good job at those anyways. So you have lots of cities where the clearance rate on homicides and other investigations is miserable. You had, even here in Minneapolis, there was a big scandal with all the rape kits that they had untested. So they had a lot of issues with crimes that were not being investigated properly. And then, the second thing that people say is that those jobs can be taken up by specialized, trained people. You can build new institutions to do those things that arent necessary policing. I did talk to one council member who said, maybe theres still police, but for very, very limited role, and many of their responsibilities are farmed out. You know, anything short of some sort of active violence, you dont need police for. So in some peoples eyes, that would still be a police force. But one thing that the people who are most ardent about abolishing the police or defunding the police, even, they make it clear that they dont just want a system in which its police in another name, police with another uniform on.

And these demands to defund the police, theyve actually been brewing in Minneapolis for several years now. Ever since a police killing back in 2015, theres been several local activist groups working on it. And those activist groups came together this past weekend in what was probably the biggest and most clearest demand for defunding the police.

Well be right back.

(CHANTING) Abolish the M.P.D.!

So there were hundreds of activists who went and gathered in front of the mayor Jacob Freys house.

Abolish the M.P.D.! And they had a megaphone. They were chanting. They were screaming. And sure enough, the mayor came out to talk to the protesters. He kind of made his way through the crowd, walked up to the front, and you had one of the lead organizers for a group called the Black Visions Collective. Kandace Montgomery, she was standing up on a riser there, talking down in a megaphone to the mayor.

Jacob Frey, we have a yes-or-no question for you. Yes or no, will you commit to defunding Minneapolis Police Department?

[INAUDIBLE]

And you could tell, like, there is this hesitation because he knows this is not going to go well, right? You have all these very vocal, very ardent activists around you who want you to defund the police.

Will you defund the Minneapolis Police Department?

[CROWD MURMURING]

All right, be quiet yall. Be quiet, because its important that we actually hear this. Its important that we hear this, because if yall dont know, hes up for re-election next year.

[CROWD CHEERING]

And then

I do not support the full abolition of the police department.

All right!

Youre wasting our time! Get the [EXPLETIVE] out of here!

And he gives his answer he does not support full abolition of the police.

(CHANTING) Go home, Jacob, go home! Go home, Jacob, go home!

And he turns around, and he just kind of walked off into the sea of people.

(CHANTING) Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!

So after this event, there was already an event planned for the following day by some of these same activists organizations, in which they were going to bring council members who were supportive of their cause onto a stage in a park in the Southern part of the city. And they were going to try to get them to make a commitment to defunding the police.

So a lot like what they had done to the mayor?

Exactly.

Hi, Minneapolis. You look so beautiful today. Im Lisa Bender. Im the president of the Minneapolis City Council.

And so we had this gathering where there were hundreds of residents.

Our efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period.

And you had council members.

Our commitment is to do whats necessary to keep every single member of our community safe, and to tell the truth that the Minneapolis Police are not doing that. [CROWD CHEERS]

And you had nine of them who went up on the stage.

We are here today to begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department. [CROWD CHEERS]

And then all nine of them each read a part pledging to defend the police.

All of us on this stage support this statement, and we stand with the people of Minneapolis in fighting for a safer community. [CROWD CHEERS]

The last council member, he basically said, and we are all committing to this pledge. And at that moment, it was like this emotional eruption.

[INAUDIBLE], get up, yall. We are transforming our city right now. Get up! get

You had white people, black people, Asian people, all putting their fists in the air, shouting, defund the police, defund police.

(CHANTING) Defund M.P.D.! Defund M.P.D.! Defund M.P.D.!

So just to be clear, this is not a vote, and not necessarily even a pledge to vote, but this is a public commitment to defund the police to do the very thing that the mayor, when asked, declined to agree to 24 hours before.

Yes, exactly. This is a pledge that they are going to defund the police. It is not a vote. It is not anything set in stone or written. But these are putting them all on record in front of many community members, saying that we are going to do this. And I even asked the activists about that. I said, weve heard politicians say things before and not keep those pledges. But this is something that they saw theyve been working on with them together in tandem. So I think theres a level of trust there that this pledge has really meant something. And you could see it in the reaction of the people who were there. They were really describing it as their Civil Rights Movement, their Voting Rights Act moment.

Wow. And John, can the members of the City Council who were in that park, making this pledge, do they have the actual authority to take away funding from the police department?

Yes, they absolutely have voting authority to do that. The council actually controls the police departments budget. And whats more significant about this moment is that because there were nine of them, those nine seats represents a veto-proof majority. So even if the mayor, Jacob Frey, does not want this to happen, if that coalition sticks together, they can do this on their own. And I think what were seeing is this sentiment is growing in traction in certain places. Like we already have in New York and Los Angeles, the mayors in both of those cities have already said that they are going to be redirecting funds that were intended for the police toward other parts of the city, toward other agencies in the city.

Im curious what the appetite for this kind of change to policing is, beyond the cities where there are largely Democratic city councils and mayors, and where this is now under discussion.

Thats a very key question, right? Were already seeing conservatives coming out against this and talking about this is as very radical leftist step to be taking. We see Donald Trump already tweeting about it. So certainly, this is something that, for conservative communities, something like this would be a tougher sell. And so again, policing is a very local thing. So what you experience and what the police force does or does not look like in Minneapolis is going to be very different than what it does or does not look like in Edina, which is just outside of Minneapolis, or any other suburb. So its going to be, in some ways, a patchwork of public safety, I think, if these things start happening around the country.

And I guess an open question is whether or not this has entered the mainstream, even of the Democratic Party. Just a few hours before you and I began to talk, Joe Biden came out and said he does not support defunding the police.

Yeah, this is certainly not something that is part of the mainstream or moderate Democratic platform. That said, you do get some people who might be in these more moderate spaces, you do get their attention and you do get their ear, is this sense that policing is not working which is just the basis of what these defund or abolish the police efforts are about, is that the system is not working. And so you will get even the more moderate folks to say that, to buy into that. And that may not result in them supporting a defund or abolishment, but will it support more stringent reforms, more significant reforms to police? So well see what happens.

I wonder how the activists that youre talking to see the challenge of explaining what these concepts are going to mean. Because in this moment, I think many Americans are really hearing these calls defund, dismantle, abolish for the first time. And they may be very wary of them, and they may see them as quite radical.

What the activists will tell you is that while it might sound radical for many Americans, this actually is not all that radical for a large section of this country.

What was your name, sir?

Yaazirah

How do you spell that?

Y-A-H-

If you go to black and brown communities like I went up to the North Side of Minneapolis and you talk to people about their experiences with the police there, it is not the experience of expecting an officer to come and help you. Its exactly the opposite. And I was speaking with a couple there, Amanda and Yaazirah Brazelton.

Its about time for a change.

A change, yeah.

Yeah. About time for a change.

And they were telling me that from a young age, essentially, they already had horrific experiences with the police.

[INAUDIBLE] I have police put guns in my face, you know, at seven years old, coming to my house with my mother and my father arguing, just regular argument that happens with a husband and wife.

Yaazirah, he was seven years old when the police came to his house when his parents were having an argument.

And they put guns in my face and put us all on the ground.

And then they stuck a gun in his face.

They traumatized me in childhood, so I was really against white police officers since.

And his wife Amanda, she was 14 when she was in a car with white people, and shes black.

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Minneapolis Will Disband Its Police Force, Council Members Pledge - The New York Times