Promises to dismantle the police department, root-and-branch, have come to little in Minneapolis.
In the immediate wake of the homicide of George Floyd under the knee of a city cop, a veto-proof majority of the city council vowed to disband the Minneapolis PD and to replace it with new systems for public safety. Instead, the city council has now voted to trim just 4.5 percent from the police budget in 2021, a move that will not change the number of cops on the street.
(Featured image is “A man prays” by quixotic54 and is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
4.5% cut (or, more accurately, funding other things) is not necessarily an awful outcome.
But I was reading the comments to the post about Camden and remembered that there was a movement to disband and I wondered what had happened to it.
3 weeks ago, Rolling Stone wrote a story explaining what happened to it.
Read the whole thing.Report
Yeah, defund was never gonna happen.
Honestly, police, and the public, need to decide what the police are here to do. Do the respond to every little thing, or do they only respond to violent crimes and the aftermath thereof?
I think one of the big things people need to come to grips with is that not every LE agent needs a gun. Since 9/11, perhaps even before, LEA have been arming everyone with a badge (much like every agency having some flavor of SWAT), and frankly, it is harmful and dangerous.Report
Defund was and has always been HL Mencken territory. Frankly I think we’ll look back on this as a missed opportunity. There were 5 minutes I thought I’d have to revisit my post on the Daniel Shaver thing but I’m getting pretty confident I won’t.Report
I note that the cities (which includes the big suburbs) up and down the Colorado Front Range are now putting money into co-responders, mental health professionals that are dispatched 24/7 for calls that appear to have a mental health aspect. So far as I can tell from reading, everyone including the regular LEOs are pleased with it.Report
You’ve mentioned that before, and I am stoked to hear it’s going well, but it’s something the biggest cities need to do as well, and the biggest counties.
It won’t take off until NY, Chicago, LA, etc. start doing it.Report
To many people who have real problems with the cops got caught up in hashtags and slogans. Those things are nice but they aren’t change. Change takes time, specific proposals, electing people who you keep working with and lots of boring details. Change is slow and a grind. Take all the energy from the protests and distribute it throughout the year and you can make progress. Protests themselves are nice, not cosmic or world changing. They can help but protests and slogans do not go that far.Report
From the article:
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Change is a grind. Slogans are easy. Solutions are unique to place very often and complicated.Report
Especially when the Charter Commission blocks ballot measures.Report