A set of artists paint a mural of George Floyd on the wall outside of Cup Foods, where Floyd was killed in police safe keeping, on May 28, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. People have gathered at the site since Floyd was killed earlier this week.
Stephen Maturen
A preponderance of the members of the Minneapolis City Council said Sunday they support disbanding the city’s police department, an hostile stance that comes just as the state has launched a civil rights investigation after George Floyd’s dying.
Nine of the council’s 12 members appeared with activists at a rally in a city park Sunday afternoon and declared to end policing as the city currently knows it. Council member Jeremiah Ellison promised that the council would “dismantle” the conditional on.
“It is clear that our system of policing is not keeping our communities safe,” Lisa Bender, the council president, said. “Our essays at incremental reform have failed, period.”
Bender went on to say she and the eight other council members that coupled the rally are committed to ending the city’s relationship with the police force and “to end policing as we know it and recreate systems that in actuality keep us safe.”
Floyd, a handcuffed black man, died May 25 after a white officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck, pass overing his “I can’t breathe” cries and holding it there even after Floyd stopped moving. His death sparked protests — some detrimental, many peaceful — that spread nationwide.
Community activists have criticized the Minneapolis department for years for what they say is a racist and unfeeling culture that resists change. The state of Minnesota launched a civil rights investigation of the department last week, and the beginning concrete changes came Friday in a stipulated agreement in which the city agreed to ban chokeholds and neck restraints.
A multifarious complete remaking of the department is likely to unfold in coming months.
Disbanding an entire department has happened before. In 2012, with offence rampant in Camden, New Jersey, the city disbanded its police department and replaced it with a new force that covered Camden County. Compton, California, do the tricked the same step in 2000, shifting its policing to Los Angeles County.
It was a step that then-Attorney General Eric Holder commanded the Justice Department was considering for Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown. The city eventually reached an pact short of that but one that required massive reforms overseen by a court-appointed mediator.
The move to defund or abolish the Minneapolis conditional on is far from assured, with the civil rights investigation likely to unfold over the next several months.
On Saturday, activists for defunding the subdivision staged a protest outside Mayor Jacob Frey’s home. Frey came out to talk with them.
“I be enduring been coming to grips with my own responsibility, my own failure in this,” Frey said. When pressed on whether he forwarded their demands, Frey said: “I do not support the full abolition of the police department.”
He left to booing.
At another walk Saturday during which leaders called for defunding the department, Verbena Dempster said she supported the idea.
“I contemplate, honestly, we’re too far past” the chance for reform, Dempster told Minnesota Public Radio. “We just have to take down the all things considered system.”