Minneapolis mayor said he does not support the dismantling of the Minneapolis Police Department. Mayor Jacob Frey said he wants to work with MPD Chief Medaria Arradondo.
Frey's statements came after nine Minneapolis City Council members expressed their intention to abolish and cut the funding of the Minneapolis Police Department.
He emphasized his plan to reform the department in a statement Sunday night.
“I’ll work relentlessly with Chief Arradondo and alongside community toward deep, structural reform and addressing systemic racism in police culture. And we’re ready to dig in and enact more community-led, public safety strategies on behalf of our city,” he said. “But I do not support abolishing the Minneapolis Police Department.”
The nine council members told community activists about their support for cutting the city’s relationship with the police department. The nine votes make up a super majority. This means it can override any veto from Frey.
Council members united
In a TIME op-ed, City Council member Steve Fletcher stressed not only the death of George Floyd that sparked protests across the US, but also the other killings. Floyd was a black man who died after Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck and choked him to death.
"Minneapolis Police officers shot and killed four more people—Thurman Blevins, Travis Jordan, Mario Benjamin, and Chiasher Fong Vue—and were caught in a bodycam audit asking EMTs to sedate suspects and others with ketamine," Fletcher wrote.
He also explained how the future would look like without the police in the city.
“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,” he wrote.
“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.”
"The lack of change hasn’t been for lack of trying. Most of us who are currently in office in Minneapolis ran on a platform that included police reform and accountability," he said.
"Many elected leaders before us have tried and failed to achieve meaningful progress on those fronts, and for the first two years of our current term, so have we. To varying degrees, we’ve all imagined that reform was possible," he added.
"Ineffective"
One of the organizations that support the dismantling of the Minneapolis Police is MPD150. On its website, the organization explained that the system of police departments is flawed from the start: “It’s not just that police are ineffective: in many communities, they’re actively harmful. The history of policing is a history of violence against the marginalized.”
It was Council member Jeremiah Ellison who publicly announced the de-funding of the police department: “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. 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,” he tweeted.
City Council President Lisa Bender as well as other council members followed Ellison's announcement after.
