Our city is reeling from serial tragedies. The death of George Floyd was a searing event and a stark reminder of the deeply rooted systemic racism we must eliminate from the culture of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). The destruction of livelihoods and needed services along Lake Street and West Broadway compounded the horror. And now, our community is enduring an alarming spike in senseless gun violence that has overwhelmingly claimed African Americans as its victims.
At stake is the future of our city, which faces an almost existential crisis. From our perspective, communities of color have been doubly victimized. We've had to endure episodes of flat-out police racism and excessive force. At the same time, our communities have been victims of crime well beyond our share of the population.
We depend on an imperfect police force lest we have an even worse situation. Solving this crisis will take awesome persistence, serious discussion, bold thinking and follow-through. It is imperative that we reform and reinvent our approach to effective and just public safety for all our citizens.
Unfortunately, the City Council's response to this crisis is a proposed charter amendment that will solve nothing. The council wants to eliminate the current MPD and transfer to itself the mayor's authority over law enforcement.
In reality, beyond bumper sticker slogans and announcing a new bureaucracy, the council has not done the hard work of designing a specific and actionable new public safety system to replace the current one. They haven't told us what comes next, let alone shown us that it will work.
All we know is that the council plans to remove the mayor's authority to run whatever (if any) law enforcement operation replaces the current MPD. They want to create a new bureaucracy run by a bureaucrat answerable to council members. Simply put, the council's proposal makes 13 council members and one bureaucrat accountable for law enforcement instead of the mayor and the police chief.
In the real world, of course, having 14 people "accountable" means nobody is really accountable.
Interestingly, two years ago the council proposed the same idea. The Charter Commission quite properly delayed putting it on the 2018 ballot. The council had 24 months to put it on the 2020 ballot but waited until now to insist that it appear. It does seem that some council members are using the current crisis as a cover for rushing an ill-formed idea to the November ballot.