A Majority of Minneapolis Councilmembers Vowed to Dismantle the City’s Police Department

A large crowd gathered for a community meeting in Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis on Sunday.Julia Lurie/Mother Jones

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At a community rally at Powderhorn Park this afternoon, 9 of Minneapolis’ 12 city councilmembers showed up and pledged to dismantle the city’s police department, marking a significant shift toward overhauling a force that’s under intense scrutiny following the killing of George Floyd on May 25. Mother Jones reporter Julia Lurie was there:

Since Floyd’s death, calls for defunding and downsizing police agencies as a way to curtail police brutality and the overpolicing of communities of color have spread. The intent signaled by the veto-proof majority of Minneapolis lawmakers will be a significant test of how a city can overhaul its police department. Within the last week, Minneapolis Public Schools, the University of Minnesota, and the Minneapolis Park Service broke ties with the city police department, which is being investigated by the state’s Department of Human Rights to determine whether its current protocols amount “to unlawful race-based policing, which deprives people of color, particularly Black community members, of their civil rights.” 

City Council President Lisa Bender tweeted on June 4 that the city would work to replace the department with a “transformative new model of public safety.” In a statement to the Appeal, which first reported the move, Bender noted that the city’s “efforts at incremental reform have failed.” In Minneapolis and elsewhere in the United States, Bender wrote, “it is clear that our existing system of policing and public safety isn’t working for so many of our neighbors.”

On Saturday, Mayor Jacob Frey faced was rebuked by demonstrators after he rejected calls to abolishi the police department and instead proposed reforming it.

It’s unclear what dismantling the Minneapolis police department will look like going forward. Steve Fletcher, a City Council member in Minneapolis’ Third Ward, wrote in an op-ed for Time that he among others supported an effort to “disband our police department and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity.” “Our city needs a public safety capacity that doesn’t fear our residents,” Fletcher wrote. “That doesn’t need a gun at a community meeting. That considers itself part of our community. That doesn’t resort quickly to pepper spray when people are understandably angry. That doesn’t murder black people.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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