Shutterstock
Minneapolis City Hall
On Wednesday, Minneapolis City Council Members Phillipe Cunningham, Steve Fletcher and Jeremy Schroeder presented the details of their Transforming Public Safety Charter Amendment to the council as a whole. In response to public calls for transformational change to the city’s public safety systems, the amendment would create a Department of Public Safety to unite the city’s safety operations, replacing the current police department. But that doesn’t mean it would eliminate the police: the proposed DPS would include a division of law enforcement services, alongside other functions like a traffic safety division, mental health crisis response, and homeless outreach.
“Tens of thousands of people took to the streets here in Minneapolis following the murder of George Floyd. The death of George Floyd was egregious and triggered a national reckoning around race and policing. The movement we have seen grow is also based in a long history of dissatisfaction in and anchored toward our current system, that has relied on violence to force compliance from, and social control over, particularly BIPOC communities. We have heard the demands for change, for a different way of keeping people safe, and now the work is in our hands,” said Council Member Cunningham.
So, with the proposed Department of Public Safety in place, what would change? According to the council members’ vision: oversight and accountability. Right now, the mayor has complete control over the police department’s operations and policies. Under a Department of Public Safety, the mayor and department heads would manage day-to-day operations. But the city council would have legislative authority over the department—as they do with all others—which means that law enforcement would be accountable to the public legislative process. The amendment’s co-authors say this would end a norm of “closed-door conversations” between the mayor and the MPD chief, and allow the community to have a voice on law enforcement issues through their council members, who would have real power to set policy.
Also, the council members’ vision would reorganize the city’s current safety operations, which are spread out across many departments, into one centralized department. That means things like the Office of Violence Prevention, Emergency Management, and 911 response would be structured under the DPS. But it also means that functions that have thus far largely been the police’s responsibility—like traffic safety, mental health crisis response, opioid response, and homeless outreach—would be separate from law enforcement services.
“We also get to create a home for functions that are currently gaps in our system, that don’t exist at the city [level] but should. Traffic enforcement today is something we basically don’t do, outside of pretext stops by MPD. Community has consistently expressed concerns both about traffic safety and about [the] racially biased and harmful way we do traffic stops today,” said Council Member Fletcher. “It creates a clear organizational role for law enforcement, by creating divisions responsible for many of the functions, like mental health response and homeless outreach, that MPD should no longer be leading.”
Among the amendment’s goals are to address the root causes of crime, to centralize commonsense responses that prioritize safety, dignity, and justice, and to match emergency calls to the right kind of responders. It would also eliminate the requirement that the city employ at least 0.0017 employees per resident, which equates to about 730 officers.
But the amendment itself is just a framework: an ordinance outline defining a new Department of Public Safety will be created in collaboration with residents, and with a specific focus on BIPOC communities and impacted stakeholders. A citywide survey will go live June 1, followed by public meetings this summer, and drafting and public comment this fall, before a November vote on the charter amendment.
“Intentional engagement, rather than engagement for engagement’s sake, is critical to building new systems of public safety,” said Council Member Cunningham.
The council members’ charter amendment is similar to the amendment put forth by Yes 4 Minneapolis, a Black-led coalition of community organizations. It’s radically different, however, from a recent proposal by the City Charter Commission itself to define the mayor's powers as chief executive and specifies that council members may not “usurp, invade or interfere with the mayor’s direction or supervision.” Mayor Frey recently reaffirmed his support of a “both-and” approach to public safety that includes greater police presence. All three charter proposals may appear on the ballot this November, though Council Member Schroeder said that if it becomes clear that both the council’s and the Yes 4 Minneapolis proposals do effectively the same thing—creating a Department of Public safety that includes law enforcement—he’d be amenable to dropping the amendment.
Susan Trammell, ethics officer and city attorney, raised concerns about "the promotion or laying the groundwork for a particular ballot question."
"I want to caution this group that using city resources to generate support for a charter amendment either proposed by the city or by the community and not providing a comprehensive comparison of the facts and implications of all the ballot questions could be viewed as a violation of the prohibition against using city resources for ballot question support," Trammell said.
The city council also voted unanimously to make Juneteenth a paid holiday for city employees on Wednesday.
Last summer, council members gathered in Powderhorn Park to announce their intent to "recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.”
