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Tanzina Vega: I'm Tanzina Vega and you're listening to The Takeaway. In the days following George Floyd's killing by police, a majority of the members on the Minneapolis City Council boldly pledged to quote end policing as we know it and disband the city's police department. Fast forward five months and that pledge have yet to translate into reality. After months of protests in Minneapolis, a nationwide sweeping structural change to the city's police department is essentially at a standstill. Here to discuss what happened in Minneapolis is Brent Williams, correspondent for Minnesota Public Radio. Brent, thanks for joining me.
Brent Williams: I'm glad to be here.
Tanzina: Big promises after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis City Council, to essentially, and to use a phrase that we're using a lot, defund the police. What was the promise? Did they pledge to defund the police? Abolish the police? What exactly were they trying to accomplish?
Brent: Well, Tanzina, as you mentioned, they use a lot of different terms to describe what they were planning to do. I looked at a couple of quotes back from the day when they were at the park making this pledge. One council member said they were going to abolish our current Minneapolis police system. Another said this council is going to dismantle the police department. Another said our commitment is to end the city's toxic relationship with Minneapolis police department.
There were a lot of different ways that they said it and it came off as, there's going to be some major changes made. A few days after that, the council went ahead and they drafted some language to put forward to the city's charter commission, which would have allowed the council to essentially eliminate MPD from the city's charter as a funded department and create this new department called Community Safety and Violence Prevention. That department would have been under the supervision of the city council, not the mayor, who is currently playing that role.
Tanzina: I think one of the big questions that comes up when we talk about criminal justice reform, particularly in this moment of the conversation around "defunding the police", what exactly would the replacement body have done?
Brent: Well, it's a good question. The details were somewhat vague, this proposal would have allowed this new department to include a division, which would have employed licensed peace officers, and that meaning police officers, likely ones carrying guns. It wasn't clear how many of those would be a part of this particular department? Where would they patrol? There is a director of this department who would have to have some type of community crime prevention experience, not necessarily a police chief.
There were all these different ideas of this new department that would be not like the typical armed police force that we got to respond to everything. The vagueness of that was one of the reasons why people had such a problem. Some people had such a problem accepting this new idea.
Tanzina: How far did it get before it essentially evaporated? Or has it evaporated?
Brent: The charter commission, which is this unelected body of 15 residents of the city took up the amendment language in July. They held about a month's worth of meetings, they held some public hearings, they even debated some proposed changes that they would want to make to this amendment. In August, they decided, "You know, look, we need more information about this. There's not enough time to get this on the ballot. We're going to delay our decision until later this year." Basically, that ran out the timeline on the deadline they needed to meet in order to get it on this fall's ballot.
Tanzina: How is it being defined right now? You hinted earlier that that was part of the confusion and why this really didn't take off in Minneapolis.
Brent: Right? When people hear the term 'defund', it could mean different things to different people. The council has basically, and this is something that they've started doing not just this year, but in past years as well, they will reallocate some funds from the Minneapolis police department's budget to other non-law enforcement crime prevention programs, such as in the city's Office of violence prevention. They've been undertaking this public health approach to violence prevention.
The council has during the budget process, reallocated just over a million dollars from the police department's budget to the office of violence prevention, to create all kinds of different programs, including funding a group of so-called violence interrupters, that would be out on the streets. These are non-armed non-law enforcement people who would go out and try to inject themselves in situations that could turn violent.
They've been doing this type of process. That type of defunding seems to be pretty popular and noncontroversial. The idea of taking large blocks of money from the police budget, like there's a group they're demanding take $40 or $50 million from the department's already $180 to $190 million budget, and taking that out and moving it to various different parts of the city. That has not had as much traction at least among city council members.
Tanzina: Brent, I'm wondering if you can help us take a national view here, that 30,000-foot view, if you will, about this. I've encountered a lot of antagonism, particularly on social media, for asking questions about what the plan would be for violence prevention in the absence of-- if, in fact, police departments are completely abolished? I think that that's a fair question. It appears to ruffle a lot of feathers, if you will, on the more progressive left. What does this tell us about the push to "defund the police" nationally? We heard a lot about it over the summer, and then suddenly, it seems to have died down a little bit.
Brent: Talking to a lot of folks here, I get the sense that due to-- Again, the pandemic, I think, is also playing a role in this. We're having to rethink a lot of how our institutions function. People are starting to wrap their heads around like maybe we can do all these things a lot differently than we've been doing them. Then following the killing of George Floyd, I noticed a lot of people taking this seriously that law enforcement can also undergo some major changes, including maybe not having armed police officers out there to respond to everything.
Now, while there are some folks who say we can get rid of all police, as long as we've taken all that money and put them into the types of programs and housing, and you name it. I mean, their argument is, look, people who have stable homes and environments and have their mental health and their faculties, they don't go out and commit these types of crimes that would require the intervention of an armed police officer. You put all that money into those types of programs and you should be able to eliminate the need for that type of intervention from somebody who is carrying a firearm and has a license to kill people.
Now, the debate here has been, yes, this can be done, but maybe not this year, or in the next five years. I don't think anybody in the Minneapolis City Council seriously thinks that this is something that's going to happen. Obviously, that's not going to happen overnight, but they're really pushing the idea, several council members, that look, this is a future that we can imagine, we can envision this happening. As you know, it's gonna take a while for people to share that same vision.
Tanzina: We'll be paying close attention to how it all pans out. Brent Williams is a correspondent for Minnesota Public Radio. Brent, thanks so much for joining us.
Brent: You're welcome.
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