{"id":3427,"date":"2021-05-25T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-25T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/?p=3427"},"modified":"2021-05-25T14:18:39","modified_gmt":"2021-05-25T14:18:39","slug":"one-year-later-policing-violence-and-public-safety-in-minneapolis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/one-year-later-policing-violence-and-public-safety-in-minneapolis\/","title":{"rendered":"One Year Later: Policing, Violence, and Public Safety in Minneapolis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This piece was originally published by Scatterplot<\/a><\/em> on May 24th, 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Image Credit: Ben Hovland<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Tomorrow marks one year since the murder of George Floyd at 38th and Chicago in South Minneapolis, sparking a\u00a0rebellion<\/a>\u00a0that burned a police precinct and much of a nearby\u00a0commercial strip<\/a>. In the days that followed, a\u00a0veto-proof majority<\/a>\u00a0of the Minneapolis City Council declared their intention to \u201cdismantle\u201d the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). This declaration seemed to place the city at the forefront of a national conversation to\u00a0reimagine public safety<\/a>\u00a0and redress racialized police violence. And yet, although the people of Minneapolis largely agree about the need for systematic changes in policing, residents, activists, and policymakers continue to disagree about the nature and scope of those transformations. These\u00a0political struggles<\/a> have complicated efforts to dismantle\u00a0the MPD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

As I wrote on scatterplot<\/a> last summer, periods of upheaval<\/a>rarely produce total abandonment of the status quo, but political leaders, activists, and community members can use such openings to shift the direction of policies, practices, and institutional and cultural arrangements. Those words ring even truer today. Nearly a year following the declaration, the MPD remains standing, but changed, as the city continues to struggle over how to create \u201csafety for all\u201d in a starkly unequal society. Fights over public safety are central to the upcoming election, where city residents will vote on a new charter amendment to replace the MPD with a Department of Public Safety and re-elect or vote out of office the council members who have fought for (or resisted) these changes and the Mayor who has rebuffed calls to dismantle the MPD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started writing this post several weeks ago, trying to map out the many developments in public safety over the past year. But the details soon grew too long for the format, threatening to turn a blog post into the book<\/a> I\u2019m currently writing on policing in Minneapolis. Instead, here I\u2019ll provide several links to local reporting on these issues and then focus on the charter amendment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These changes include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n