Replies to post #493994 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

WERE the police defunded?

[janice shell]

So as your fact checker site shows, nobody "defunded" the police in Minneapolis.

[newmedman]

did you even read the article you posted?

Did Minneapolis actually defund its police department?
On Wednesday, the New York Post topped a story with this headline: “Minneapolis City Council alarmed by crime surge after defunding police.”

The piece heavily cited an MPR News article from Tuesday. Our story reported that Minneapolis City Council members were pressing Police Chief Medaria Arradondo with questions about how the department was responding to a rise in violent crime.

Some background: In June, the City Council forwarded a proposal to the city’s charter commission that would have given voters a chance to eliminate the existing funding requirement for the police department. That would have allowed the city to defund and dismantle the department and create a new Community Safety and Violence Prevention department.

But in August, the city’s charter commission decided it needed more time to consider the council’s proposal. That killed any chance that voters would see the proposal on the ballot this November. The commission’s actions essentially halted any effort to defund or dismantle the police department until at least next year.

So, it’s incorrect to say the police department has been defunded, as in, an overhaul or abolition of MPD as we know it.

But, it does depend how you’re defining “defunded.”

The City Council moved $1.1 million from the police to the health department to fund “violence interrupters” who would mediate conflicts and head off further trouble.

Some people think of defunding as shifting money from police departments to spend on other priorities, such as mental health services and other programs, to bolster public safety. Still, it’s worth noting in this case that the amount of money the council diverted is less than a percentage point of the police department’s budget.

Who called in the National Guard?
On Friday, both President Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden are making campaign stops in northern Minnesota.

In recent weeks, Trump has returned often to the destruction in Minneapolis to press his “law and order” case. But his telling of what transpired and over what time period has often been false or exaggerated.

Trump told Fox News last week that Minneapolis “was burning for two weeks before the National Guard came in.” In Wisconsin on Thursday, Trump said leaders in Minnesota “shouldn’t have allowed it to go on for 11 days. They should have called us immediately.”

In reality, the National Guard began mobilizing and moving in a few days after George Floyd’s Memorial Day killing by police after peaceful protests devolved into confrontations with police and damage to public and private buildings. The streets of Minneapolis had largely calmed days later.

Trump also claimed credit for sending in the Guard, when that was a decision by Gov. Tim Walz, who is commander in chief of his state’s Guard. During the tumult, however, Trump offered to send in active-duty military, an offer Walz considered but never acted upon.

[fuagf]

Whoever came up with the "defund the police" line was careless as they should have anticipated how it would be abused by both the far-right and the far-left. I said that when the phrase .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=166854021 .. was first batted about. So what if they voted to changed the funding structure of Minneapolis law enforcement, and to rearrange policing arrangements. Whatever they had planned, in the end could well have been positive as it has been for other cities. Anyway, it didn't happen and the activists who called for it could well have known, at the time, that it couldn't happen.

Related: rooster, Reorganization would be a booster, rooster. A booster to better relations between any particular police force and their community.
"you have no room.to talk. you vote for party that wants to defund the fucking police departments"
It's about time you got off your knees.
P - conix, Less money toward militarization of police forces could mean more money toward hiring more police to walk the beat.
[...]

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=165606135

dbergh, See: Fact check: The GOP’s dishonesty-filled barrage of ‘defund the police’ attack ads

"Poseur B402, You now are the board's biggest misinformation problem, and i for at least a few am getting fed up with it.
Your suggestion that 80% of Dems would be in favor of fewer police is scurrilous, untrue, dishonest, rubbish from you ..
Despite 'defunding' claims, police funding has increased in many US cities"

By Daniel Dale, CNN
Published 8:07 AM EDT, Sun October 23, 2022

VIEO - Abbott campaign edits Beto O'Rourke audio for attack ad 03:40 - Source: CNN

Washington CNN — Republicans have been running ads around the country that use a variety of dishonest tactics to try to create the inaccurate impression that the Democratic candidates they are targeting support defunding the police.

Some of the Republican ads simply make things up. Other ads falsely describe bills the Democratic candidates have supported. Still other ads try guilt by association, noting that the candidates have supporters who have called to defund the police but not mentioning that the candidates themselves have rejected defunding the police.

One particularly egregious guilt-by-association ad accuses a Democrat of marching with a pro-defunding progressive group without providing evidence of the supposed marching and without noting that the event in question was a local “Fun Fest” that took place nearly three years before the group endorsed defunding.

“Defund the police” is a vague slogan that means different things to different people, from completely disbanding the police to shifting some percentage of police funding to other programs and services. These ads are deceptive regardless.

Continued - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174143523

**

This to help you get up to date in the place you have lived for 30 years:

The Minneapolis Police Department Is Dismantling Itself

Since George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the MPD has shrunk by a third. Organizers should take credit.

On May 27, 2020, a portrait of George Floyd hung on a street light between two officers policing a protest in Minneapolis's Third Precinct.


A portrait of George Floyd hangs on a streetlight between two officers policing a protest in Minneapolis’s Third Precinct on May 27, 2020. Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Nearly four years ago, in response to the murder of George Floyd, a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council ascended a stage at Powderhorn Park festooned with giant letters: “DEFUND POLICE.” Reading a pledge to the audience, council members promised to “begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department” and move toward a “police-free future.” Headlines soon announced that Minneapolis had committed to defunding, disbanding, or dismantling its police force. Both the radical left and the far right went further, arguing that such changes were a path, ultimately, to abolishing the police altogether.

Of course, as we know from the vantage point of 2024, Minneapolis did not defund, dismantle, or abolish its Police Department. Indeed, the Minneapolis Police Department budget has grown, from $181 million in 2019 to $210 million in 2023. A ballot initiative put forward in November 2021 to end the MPD and replace it with a new “department of public safety” was rejected by a majority of voters. Four years later, the popular consensus is that the “Defund the police” slogan was a failure, sowing division across the left at a moment when consensus should have been at its highest.

And yet the streets of Minneapolis tell a different story. As a result of the “very strong movement to defund the police .. https://harpers.org/archive/2024/04/crime-and-punishment-5/ ,” in the words of Brian O’Hara, the new police chief, the number of officers on the force has dropped sharply. Since May 2020, the number of uniformed officers in Minneapolis has fallen by more than a third. The precipitating cause is not a lack of funding but rather a diminishment of people’s interest in becoming and staying officers with the department. The police, in other words, have downsized themselves. Whether or not the city wants more cops, the fact is it’s unlikely to find them, at least for now.

Though O’Hara has framed the drop as a “five-alarm fire” threatening the safety of city residents, it’s a victory of sorts for organizers. The reduction in the number of officers has meant that contact between police and residents is down, including discretionary or “proactive” police stops; between 2019 and 2023, MPD data shows that traffic stops and stops of “suspicious” persons and vehicles were cut in half. In 2023 and the first half of 2024, no one died in an encounter with the MPD. Importantly, the continued decline in officers in 2023 has not led to an increase in violent crime, which is receding alongside the pandemic. What all of that means is that Minneapolis has the opportunity now to make good on its promises of building a transformative new model of public safety.

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To understand why, we have to go back to the Powderhorn declaration of June 2020. Council members’ pledges that day were the product of an intense period of mobilization. As I trace in my recent book, The Minneapolis Reckoning .. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691245980/the-minneapolis-reckoning , they were also the culmination of years of activism. Black Lives Matter protests in the city had been sparked first in 2014, in solidarity with Ferguson after the killing of Michael Brown, and then expanded in 2015 after an officer with the MPD shot and killed Jamar Clark. In 2016, police in a nearby suburb killed Philando Castile. By the time the trial against that officer failed to secure a conviction, the winds had shifted in Minneapolis. Instead of fighting for criminal cases against officers and more training and oversight of the police, a group of young, predominantly Black, and queer and trans-led activists began fighting for police abolition. By 2017, the group MPD150 had put out its “progress report,” on the MPD’s 150th anniversary .. https://www.mpd150.com/report/ , declaring that the only real path toward justice and liberation was a police-free future.

In the fiery wake of the protests that racked the city in May 2020, this idea met the rage of the moment. After experiencing years of significant and sustained pressure, the nine City Council members assembled on the stage were ready to heed activists’ call. There was only one problem: The council did not have the power to “end” the MPD on its own. The MPD was a protected department, written into the city charter. The city charter also stipulated that the MPD must maintain a minimum number of officers—1.7 sworn officers per every 1,000 residents, a provision the officers’ federation won back in 1961.

Not only did the charter require this number of officers, it also gave “complete power over the establishment, maintenance, and command of the police department” to the mayor. And Mayor Jacob Frey made it clear that he did not support abolishing the police, despite the boos and cries of “shame” from activists at his doorstep. Faced with the mayor’s opposition and the constraints of the charter, the organizers and City Council members moved to change the city charter through a ballot initiative—first in 2020 (an attempt blocked by the Charter Commission) and again in 2021.

By 2021, however, another kind of dismantling was underway: Officers had begun to abandon the department. They exited first using medical leave, often with claims for post-traumatic stress disorder related to the unrest. The department was authorized by the city budget to have a sworn officer count of 888 (and mandated to have roughly 730 by the charter); by mid-July 2020, more than 150 officers had filed for disability—a “staggering .. https://www.startribune.com/staggering-number-of-mpls-cops-are-filing-disability-claims/571809512 ” level of claims, according to their attorney. After this wave of losses, officers began retiring at accelerated rates too, right as the MPD began experiencing a crisis of recruitment, as the number of people applying to work for the department plummeted.

By the start of 2023, the department was down to just 600 uniformed officers, a size not seen since 1960 and the enactment of the mandatory minimum. As local media reported, that number gave the city one of lowest staffing ratios .. https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-police-staffing-levels-reach-historic-lows-amid-struggle-for-recruitment-retention/600305214/ .. in the country, despite the promises of the charter. Today, the force stands at 560 officers.

Throughout the last four years, the police have made it clear who they blame. Lieutenant Robert “Bob” Kroll, a long-time antagonist of BLM organizers in the city and the president at the time of the Police Officers’ Federation of Minneapolis, put it most directly in summer 2020, when he told his membership in a leaked letter .. https://twitter.com/ChiefHarteau/status/1267460683408564225 .. that the city’s leadership had failed officers and the city by enabling BLM “terrorists” and the riot. Shortly afterward, in a televised interview with Minnesota Public Radio, Kroll and his team reiterated the point, blaming officers’ low morale and a sharp uptick in homicides on the failures of City Hall to “support” police work.

This same line from the police union—which amounts to an admission that public scrutiny and calls for change drive off would-be officers—continues today. Though the threat of the charter amendment is (for now) over, the MPD continues to be pressured to reform, including by a consent decree with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights .. https://mn.gov/mdhr/mpd/agreement/ .. and another one that is in the works with the Department of Justice .. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-finds-civil-rights-violations-minneapolis-police-department-and-city . As the new federation president, Sherral Schmidt, told reporters this fall, the MPD was struggling to hire .. https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-police-staffing-levels-reach-historic-lows-amid-struggle-for-recruitment-retention/600305214/ .. because of the “political nonsense within Minneapolis, coupled with low pay and two consent decrees.”

As the MPD and its spokespersons are quick to note, the costs of the scaled-down police force are obvious. In the context of an unusually violent 2020 and 2021, the department struggled to respond to many kinds of crime, slowing or stopping investigations even for serious offenses. And while violent crime has waned over the past two years, the rates remain above 2019 levels .. https://www.startribune.com/after-three-most-violent-years-minneapolis-saw-drop-in-crime-summer-but-were-not-back-to-normal-yet/600301635/ . The department recently admitted that it spent two months with zero arson investigators; and Chief O’Hara suggested that it may stop investigating property crimes altogether. The department is also facing a substantial backlog of homicide cases .. https://www.startribune.com/as-unsolved-minneapolis-homicides-stack-up-families-of-victims-wonder-if-answers-will-ever-come/600363177/ .

But looked at another way, the loss of officers is a win; it demonstrates that organizers, not only in Minneapolis but across the country, have symbolically linked policing as an institution with violence and managed to disrupt its pipeline of enforcers. And the drop in policing numbers may bring some benefits to public safety too. While research is complex on the question of whether low-level police stops deter more serious crimes, what is clear is that they come with significant social costs .. https://theappeal.org/policing-studies/ , including the erosion of community trust and the destabilization of the families of those who undergo them.

It’s also clear that policing is not the only way to prevent crime and disorder, nor do police always need to be the ones responding to crime. In Minneapolis, city leaders have started this work of building new models. For example, the city launched new behavioral crisis response teams .. https://www.minneapolismn.gov/resident-services/public-safety/unarmed-public-safety/behavioral-crisis-response/ , which send out unarmed responders to 911 calls related to mental and behavioral health crises, and sponsored community-based violence prevention programs .. https://www.minneapolismn.gov/government/departments/neighborhood-safety/ , which seek to interrupt the cycle of violence through public presence and mentorship. These new programs are housed alongside the police in a new Office of Community Safety, mimicking the model behind the charter amendment. While city funding is still overwhelmingly directed toward the police, these kinds of programs represent the best path forward for developing new prevention and response models.

Just as the murder of George Floyd sent shock waves across the world four years ago, so too should the present-day realities of public safety in Minneapolis inform the national conversation on policing. In a moment when police departments across the country find themselves “understaffed and beleaguered,” as a survey of police chiefs across the nation put it, the time is ripe to experiment with new models. These new initiatives are the legacy of the defund movement, which still shapes the local politics of policing today. Its true impact will be measured in years, not months, and by our collective will for change.

Michelle Phelps @MichelleSPhelps

Michelle Phelps is a sociologist and the author of The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America.

https://newrepublic.com/article/181832/minneapolis-police-department-dismantling