Minneapolis Slashes Police Budget by $8 Million Despite Record Crime Levels
Evan James
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Despite record crime rates in their city, the Minneapolis City Council passed a budget that takes $8 million from the police department and puts it towards “alternative public safety strategies.”
Such alternative public safety strategies include mental health, social, and non-police response services.
Although the city council unanimously cut the police budget, they voted 7-6 to remove language about decreasing staff and to increase recruitment opportunities. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey threatened to veto the budget if the council remained committed to reducing staff from 888 to 750.
The Minneapolis City Council has toned down their initial call to defund the police and radically transform the concept of public safety. It still appears they are committed to achieving that goal over the long-term; they just won’t try to achieve it at breakneck speed.
Minneapolis has been struggling with increased crime since the George Floyd riots. Homicides are up 85 percent, carjackings are up 331 percent, and there have been 532 gunshot victims so far in 2020, which is up more than 100 percent from 2019. The Wall Street Journal also published a story about the city’s woes Thursday titled “George Floyd Memorial Thrives, but Minneapolis Neighborhood Struggles.”
Back in mid-November Big League Politics reported on the Minneapolis City Council’s approval of a $500,000 appropriation to hire police officers from neighboring cities, due to an exodus of Minneapolis officers leaving the force:
And in September Minneapolis city councilors described their constituents as “terrorized” by high crime rates and stated that the Minneapolis PD is often “nowhere to be seen”:
If present demographic and crime trends continue, Minneapolis will resemble Detroit within the next decade or two. It will be a husk of its once thriving self—and it will have all been self-inflicted.
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