“I’m at the community meeting at Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis, where City Council members just unveiled a mission statement for reimagining policing,” Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted Sunday night.
Two weeks after George Floyd’s death in police hands sparked worldwide protests, nine members of the Minneapolis City Council announced they would disband the existing force and reconstitute it aligned along a community-based, public safety model. A white police officer pressed his knee onto the 46-year-old black man’s neck for nearly nine minutes, killing him.
The Guardian reports:
“In Minneapolis and in cities across the US, it is clear that our system of policing is not keeping our communities safe,” said Lisa Bender, the Minneapolis city council president, at the event. “Our efforts at incremental reform have failed, period. Our commitment is to do what’s necessary to keep every single member of our community safe and to tell the truth: that the Minneapolis police are not doing that. Our commitment is to end policing as we know it and to recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.”
The veto-proof council majority provided no timeline. Any drastic change to the department might have to go to a public vote to change the city charter which “would require a public vote or full approval of the entire city council along with the mayor.” Mayor Jacob Frey opposes the move and was booed at a Saturday protest for refusing to commit to defunding the MPD.
“We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response,” Ward 5 City Council Member, Jeremiah Ellison, tweeted Thursday. Sunday afternoon, the body began the process.
“Reimagining policing” is less sticky than the “defund the police” message advanced by many street protesters, but has the advantage of not sounding like a call for anarchy. Standing on a stage bearing a “defund” banner, the council instead made clear they believe it is time to rebuild the local force from the ground up. A growing online database of videos of police violence supports that.
The “warrior cop” ethos, backed by surplus military equipment, has not turned the U.S. into a police state yet. But images from the last week and a half of protests across the country demonstrate how far down that road we have gone.
Any notion that we can control human behavior with a simplistic carrots-and-sticks approach is weighted heavily towards sticks when rules are set by people seemingly reared with a “spare the rod” ethos. “Sweeter carrots and sharper sticks” don’t always work as common sense suggests. Sometimes they work just the opposite.
Moneys that might make communities healthier are going to keeping unhealthy communities under control. People with substance abuse and mental health issues are being expensively housed in our prisons rather than provided more humane treatment outside the criminal justice system. Reliance on force-first policing instead leads to lopsided budgets like Baltimore’s.
Budgets like this reflect seveerly misplaced priorities. An ounce of prevention was once thought common sense as well.
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.