Nearly Nine Months After George Floyd Incident, Minneapolis Spends $6.4 Million to Hire Dozens of Additional Police Officers

The Minneapolis City Council voted unanimously on Friday to grant additional funds to the police department. $6.4 million, to be exact.

The Minneapolis Police Department had requested additional funds from the city, claiming that they have only 638 officers available for duty, which is approximately 28 percent fewer than usual. According to a CBS Minnesota article from November 2019, the department usually has 888 officers on the force.

Following the death of George Floyd, possibly the worst rioting any city has seen since Los Angeles in 1992, and calls from city officials to dismantle the police department, a significant number of Minneapolis officers have resigned, retired, or went on medical leave. All this has led to skyrocketing violent crime and longer response times.

Big League Politics has previously reported on the many Minneapolis residents who felt “terrorized” by criminals and lamented a virtually nil police presence.

Minneapolis saw the following increases in violent crime from 2019 to 2020: homicides up 85 percent, carjackings 331 percent, and gunshot victims over 100 percent. Despite slashing its police budget by $8 million in December 2020, the Minneapolis City Council thankfully did not approve a decrease in police department staffing.

Suffice it to say that “defund the police” is a dead concept, a hysterical rallying cry that has died down over time. Restructuring the police, however, is still considered doable and even necessary to some. ABC News says that three Minneapolis City Council members would like to create a “public safety department that would include law enforcement and other services.”