MINNEAPOLIS, MN — Whether they call it “disbanding” or “dismantling” or “overhaul,” multiple members of the Minneapolis City Council are openly discussing making dramatic changes to the city’s police department.
Minneapolis is no stranger to discussions over whether resources poured into the police could be better used elsewhere. But the ongoing protests and international outrage triggered by the scene of brutality and indifference in the killing of George Floyd, has, for at least six of the council’s thirteen members, pushed the issue past its breaking point.
“We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,” tweeted Ward 5 City Council member Jeremiah Ellison on Thursday. (Ellison’s father, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, is prosecuting ex-officers Derek Chauvin, Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao.)
Ellison’s tweet continued: “And when we’re done, we’re not simply gonna glue it back together. We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response. It’s really past due.”
Ward 9 council member Alondra Cano summed up her position in ten words and a hashtag: “The Mpls Police Department is not reformable. Change is coming. #Justice4George.”
Other councilmembers, while not explicitly calling for a dismantling of the city’s police department, proposed policies that would still fundamentally change the department’s mandate and funding.
“It is time to completely overhaul how we don’t do police oversight in Minneapolis,” tweeted Ward 2 Counselor Camera Gorden, sharing a tweet from from a KARE 11 investigation published Tuesday that found, among other things, Minneapolis officers with more than a dozen complaints who had never faced discipline.
In Ward 11, council member Jeremy Schroeder voiced support for shifting funding away from the department. In a Tuesday tweet, he wrote, “Adjusting our public safety funding to prioritize investment in violence prevention and community-based programs will be a major part of the City Council’s budget work going forward.”
It’s not just the circumstances of Floyd’s killing or the horrific video — which preserved the moments that he fought for air beneath the knee of now-fired Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin — that’s moved the issue to a turning point. It’s the history of a department that Ward 3 Counselor Steve Fletcher described as “a protection racket.”
Fletcher, in a wide ranging Twitter thread posted Tuesday, argued that the department’s past and present revealed an institution beyond repair. The police department, he wrote,”is irredeemably beyond reform.”
“That is what the people in the streets in Minneapolis have now changed,” Fletcher observed later in the thread. “People got four officers immediately fired. People in the streets got Derek Chauvin charged, and his prosecution transferred to the AG.”
Fletcher’s thread continued: “I don’t know yet, though several of us on the council are working on finding out, what it would take to disband the MPD and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity.”
What would a fresh start of the Minneapolis police look like? Lisa Bender, the council’s president and representative of Ward 10, suggested that a new system would be just as susceptible to abuse by white people reporting minor law-breaking as the current one is.
“If you are a comfortable white person asking to dismantle the police, I invite you to reflect,” Bender wrote in a Tuesday tweet. “Are you willing to stick with it? Will you be calling in three months to ask about garage break-ins? Are you willing to dismantle white supremacy in all systems, including a new system?”
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