The City Council of Minneapolis wants to disband the police
I’m a Minneapolis City Council Member. We Must Disband the Police—Here’s What Could Come Next article By Steve Fletcher .
Every member of the Minneapolis City Council has now expressed the need for dramatic structural change. I am one of many on the Council, including the Council President and the Chair of Public Safety, who are publicly supporting the call to disband our police department and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity. What I hear from most of my constituents is that they want to make sure we provide for public safety, and they have learned their whole lives to equate “safety” with “police,” but are now concluding that need not be the case, Steve Fletcher wrote in Time Play very long dissertation on why police should be defunded in Minneapolis.
His new social experiment looks like this “ We had already pushed for pilot programs to dispatch county mental health professionals to mental health calls, and fire department EMTs to opioid overdose calls, without police officers. We have similarly experimented with unarmed, community-oriented street teams on weekend nights downtown to focus on de-escalation. We could similarly turn traffic enforcement over to cameras and, potentially, our parking enforcement staff, rather than our police department……….We can invest in cultural competency and mental health training, de-escalation and conflict resolution. We can send a city response that that is appropriate to each situation and makes it better. We can resolve confusion over a $20 grocery transaction without drawing a weapon or pulling out handcuffs…..Read the entire proposal in Time
Here are our current statistics citywide, pertaining to protests.
Please note: These numbers are reflective to this morning (Saturday, 5/30). We will provide updates as time permits. City of Minneapolis police department.