Early in the afternoon of Sunday, June 7th, nine members of the Minneapolis City Council appeared together on a stage in Powderhorn Park, masked and socially distanced. Demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd had been unfurling for nearly two weeks, and though the police commissioner had fired all four of the officers present during his death, and though the district attorney had indicted the police officer Derek Chauvin for murder, the protests had only grown more urgent. The Powderhorn Park rally had been organized by two local activist groups, the Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block, and their slogan was written on a banner at the foot of the stage: “Defund the police.” They had also been negotiating with the members of the city council, who control the budget of the Minneapolis police, to get them to commit to defunding as a policy. Now the nine council members, a veto-proof majority, had come to the activists’ event to say that they wanted what the activists and the people at the protests wanted. “Our commitment,” Lisa Bender, the council’s president and a former city planner, said, “is to end policing as we know it.”
Bender’s words did not reflect as specific a program as the activists might have wanted. To “abolish” the police, as the Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison said he favored, was not exactly the same as “defunding” it, which could mean anything from a dramatic to a slight change to its budget. To “end policing as we know it” was vaguer still; it could mean significant defunding or else some pilot programs and a rebranding. Taken together, though, the council members’ words did suggest radical intent. “This is brave,” the executive director of the Black Visions Collective, Kandace Montgomery, said.
Watching the event from lockdown, streaming a bright Midwestern afternoon into a gray home office, I couldn’t help but be interested in how the Minneapolis City Council had reached this point, and what would happen next. Black Lives Matter has been the most effective protest movement in half a century, at least when it comes to shifting public opinion. Four years ago, roughly forty per cent of Americans said that they supported the movement. Now that number is close to seventy per cent, which means that hundreds of millions of Americans, many of them white and moderate or conservative, have changed their points of view. Will that consensus be diverted into itineraries of private consciousness-changing—of antiracist book clubs, and corporate awareness seminars, and conversations between parents and children—or will it lead to the policy change that has become the rallying cry of protesters around the country: to defund the police? This is an idea that, until recently, even the most progressive Democrats have generally dismissed. Bernie Sanders has said he does not support it. Karen Bass, the progressive congresswoman from California who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, has said, of “defund the police,” “that’s probably one of the worst slogans ever.” In Minneapolis, here were nine people willing to edge a bit further along the diving board, and to promise a specific change. It raised some obvious questions. Why them? And what did this commitment actually mean?
Minneapolis has long had a reputation for liberalism, but over the past decade it has become one of the most left-leaning constituencies in the country. “People think of Minneapolis as flyover country, but I’ve lived all over, including in the Bay Area, and this is the most progressive city in the country,” Phillipe Cunningham, the councilman for the Fourth Ward, told me. It is, at least, represented by perhaps the country’s most obviously progressive city council: Cunningham, a former special-education teacher, and Andrea Jenkins, a former city council policy aide and now its vice-president, are two of the first transgender people to hold public office. Jeremiah Ellison, the son of the Minnesota attorney general, Keith Ellison, and a prominent local activist, first came to public attention after a photo showed a police officer pointing a grenade launcher at him at a Black Lives Matter protest. Alondra Cano, who represents the Ninth Ward and chairs the public-safety committee, is the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and campaigned as an immigrants’-rights activist. These politicians, I was told repeatedly, were elected by a new-left coalition that has largely displaced the ward politics of the past, consisting of the growing Latino and East African immigrant communities, a young Black population that was organized by the Black Lives Matter movement, and white liberals increasingly willing to back certain progressive causes. “They didn’t come up the traditional way—they didn’t serve on school boards and so on,” Larry Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, said, of the new council members. “It’s a city council of activists.”
This made the council a bit more likely to see the police as activists do. From the perspective of many of the activists, and some academic allies, the essential position of the police has not changed in modern American history. As Montgomery, who has been perhaps the most influential activist in Minneapolis in the months after Floyd’s death, put it to me, “What I know as a Black person whose family is from the South is that police started off as slave patrols, to capture and utilize people in my family who were seeking freedom, and police continue to do the exact same thing.” If well-intentioned efforts to reform the police keep seeming to fail, this camp believed, then maybe that was because policing was fundamentally illiberal, in a way that did not have much to do with who the cops were as individuals or how they had been trained. You could take a group of Buddhist monks, organize them into military-style squads, arm and outfit them like soldiers, tell them that they were heading into dangerous neighborhoods filled with criminals and hidden guns, and ask them to intervene in human dramas (mental illness, infidelity, rivalry), and things would inevitably go awry. As Alex Vitale, a sociologist at CUNY and a leading academic advocate of police abolition, put it to me, “The problem is the mission.”
But, from another perspective, one that until recently was dominant among mayors and city councils, the character of the police has changed many times. Some of these changes were broad and generational. In the nineteen-eighties, as the number of inner-city murders spiked, police departments grew far larger, and patrols grew more frequent and militaristic. In the nineties, politicians began to press the leaders of these suddenly massive departments to adopt the friendlier posture of community policing, which eventually became the default way that police chiefs spoke about their jobs, at least in public. In the two-thousands, the focus was on precision policing: more tactical gear, leftover from the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yes, but more precise targets, too, in hotspot programs built from Boston and New York’s COMPSTAT model. Police would pinpoint not just the west side of town but six particular corners, and not all young men who lived there but those with prior gun arrests, a focus which led to some reductions in crime, as in Baltimore, but also excessive policies like New York’s Stop, Question, and Frisk, which, before it became a byword for constant harassment, was a program for taking guns off the street. The era of precision policing reflected a confidence, among politicians, that new policies could change the police. If a city wanted a more progressive police department, it could hire a new chief and new consultants, retrain its officers, and implement less permissive use-of-force policies. Crime was by that point so thoroughly measured that the public could see the effect of new policies, neatly laid out on a graph and displayed on a municipal Web site. Change—which is to say control of the police—was possible.
At the beginning of the Trump years, these two left-of-center positions—the liberal conviction that the police could be reformed and the radical one that they could not—generally occupied separate spheres. The idea that the police needed to be abolished, their funding stripped away, was a slogan for protest, not a call taken up by even the most progressive elected officials, who tended to advocate for alternative-intervention programs instead. In Minneapolis, the Black Visions Collective has been campaigning to defund the police since 2018—Montgomery told me that the group’s volunteers have placed sixty thousand calls and e-mails to city-council officials. But even when a new, very progressive city council was elected, in 2017, this campaign barely dented its consciousness. Cano said that, although activists had appeared at several council hearings demanding defunding, there had not been serious discussion among the members of anything like police abolition. The city had not yet tried clearing a neighborhood of police, to experiment with a different model of public safety. No city anywhere had done that. The most prominent example of police disbanding took place in Camden, New Jersey, in 2013, but once the city department was dissolved and the union abolished, the state of New Jersey hired a replacement force that was not only a recognizable police department but a larger and more expensive one, which managed to reduce civilian complaints but did so while patrolling the city of Camden more, not less.
Violent crime is now far lower than it was during the eighties and nineties, when mass policing was instituted. Policing scholars tend to see the movement to defund the police in this context. “Questioning the police could not have happened without low crime,” Tom Tyler, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, said. But in Minneapolis, and other cities, it also reflects growing mistrust between an increasingly progressive population and police unions whose leaders have only grown more outspoken, and have built alliances with Republicans. In Minneapolis, the longtime president of the police union, Bob Kroll, who last year introduced President Trump at a campaign rally and complained about the Obama Administration’s “handcuffing and oppression of police,” has been an especially powerful figure, able at crucial moments to defy the municipal chain of command. In 2012, Kroll’s union successfully lobbied the state legislature to pass a law functionally repealing the city’s police-review board, an organization that the city council had created and that had existed for a quarter century. In 2017, when the mayor of Minneapolis banned “warrior-style” training for police officers, Kroll announced that the union would offer the training sessions itself.
During the next several years, there were several high-profile police killings of civilians in Minneapolis. Local Black Lives Matter activists often point to the death of Jamar Clark, an unarmed twenty-four-year-old Black man who was killed, in 2015, by police officers who had arrived to break up a fight at a party. The officers were not criminally tried and remained on the force. But political insiders also cite the killing, in 2017, of an unarmed white yoga instructor named Justine Damond by a Somali-American officer named Mohamed Noor. “That really was something that shifted the attitude of white middle-class voters towards the police,” Gary Cunningham, a former city official who helped create the civilian-review board, told me. “In fact, I had white people who came to me and said, ‘Oh, now I realize, I can be killed by the police.’ It really shifted the psyche.”
In the wake of those killings, and the protests that followed, Minneapolis’s then-mayor, Betsy Hodges (who is married to Cunningham), appointed the city’s first Black police chief, Medaria Arradondo. Both pledged to put Minneapolis at the forefront of police reform. “We had not just national experts but global experts in police reform coming in,” Phillipe Cunningham told me. “We had de-escalation training, procedural-justice training. Every one of the four officers involved in the killing of George Floyd had received this training.” Cunningham added, “No one could say that we didn’t try reform. We tried every kind of reform. And we still paid twenty-two million dollars last year in civil settlements for the police. We still have rape kits that no one is investigating. George Floyd was still killed. It just didn’t work.”
But when the members of the city council in Minneapolis described their decisions to support the defund movement, I found that they talked much less about a sense that reform had run its course than about a recent collapse of their trust in the Minneapolis police. In many cases, this turn happened during the week after Floyd’s death, when riots spread through the city, forcing the governor to call in the National Guard. At about 1:30 A.M. on Friday, May 29th, Steve Fletcher, a council member who represents the Third Ward, downtown, left his home on his bike to see what was happening at a small protest. “It was mostly kids—kids of color from our city—and it was small, compared to what was happening in other places,” Fletcher said. Then he rode by the First Precinct building, a few blocks away. “They had like two shifts of officers just guarding the precinct building,” Fletcher said.
Not long after, Fletcher started getting calls to his cell phone from businesses in his district. “They’d all been robbed,” Fletcher said. One business owner who called said that he had been robbed at midnight, and then robbed again around 1:30 A.M. “because they saw that no one was coming,” and then robbed again an hour later, while the owner was on the phone with Fletcher. “I was realizing, Oh, my God, people are calling me because they can’t get through to 911, and nobody is responding even if they do get through to the police. No one is coming,” Fletcher said. “At a certain point, you say, they were only defending the precinct, and they left the rest of the community to fend for ourselves.”
On the east side of the city, near the University of Minnesota, a council member named Cam Gordon had marched with one of the protests and then watched the late-night violence from afar. “Many of the biggest buildings that burned were in the district that I represent,” in the Second Ward, Gordon said. The reports that came to him about the police behavior there were “all about escalation, there was no effort to de-escalate. And it was all about defending their fortress, their building. And they’d even push people away to other building areas, and let them get away with anything.”
In poorer neighborhoods, the lack of support from the police was starker still. The Fourth Ward, which Cunningham represents, is mostly residential but has a few streets with small shops, many of them owned by immigrants. When it became clear that the police were not responding at all, he and some of his neighbors began assembling citizen patrols. “Small groups of people all carrying fire extinguishers, and whistles, and that was how we were going to make sure that our community was protected,” Cunningham told me. Nearby, in Jeremiah Ellison’s mostly black Fifth Ward, the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. organized armed citizen patrols from a restaurant called Sammy’s Avenue Eatery. A Washington Post reporter was with Ellison when he joined a group of civilians trying to put out a fire in a barbershop. They were unsuccessful, and the building was destroyed.
The disgust of many of the council members at the police during the protests suggests just how late their support for defunding consolidated, and how much the police might have cost themselves by their reactions. Within two weeks after Floyd’s killing, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, the University of Minnesota, and the Walker Art Center all formally severed ties with the police. Fletcher told me that, during the week after Floyd’s killing, he had spoken by videoconference with the neighborhood council of Beltrami Park, a wealthy, largely white community, who urged him to defund the police. The city-council president, Lisa Bender, told me, “We need a full picture of what happened in the weeks following George’s killing. But there’s a potential story there that says the police department walked away from the city.”
The activists were also leaning heavily on the city-council members. The councilwoman Andrea Jenkins, who is both Black and transgender, woke up on Saturday, May 30th, to find eighty white plastic tombstones on her lawn. Her first thought was that they’d been planted by white supremacists, but on closer inspection each turned out to read “Defund the Police” and to bear the names of civilians killed by police—they were the work of activists with the Black Visions Collective. “Scare tactics,” Jenkins said. But she decided that she agreed with their call to defund the police.
By the following Wednesday, June 3rd, nine days after George Floyd’s killing, the members of the city council received a joint message from the leaders of Reclaim the Block and the Black Visions Collective, asking them to commit to reducing the police budget by forty-five million dollars a year. “It seemed simultaneously too big and too small,” Fletcher, the councilperson for the Third Ward, told me. By Friday, the activists had presented a new demand—to completely defund the police department and replace it with a new approach to public safety—and many of the council members seemed committed to it.
On Saturday afternoon, Montgomery led a demonstration outside the home of Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, a thirty-nine-year-old former attorney. Frey, wearing a black mask printed with the B.L.M. slogan “I Can’t Breathe,” came out to speak to the protesters. Montgomery, standing on a riser and holding a microphone toward Frey, said, “Jacob Frey, we have a yes-or-no question for you. Yes or no, will you commit to defunding Minneapolis Police Department?” Frey answered that, although he wanted “structural reform,” “I do not support the full abolition of the police department.” Montgomery pulled the microphone back. “All right!” she shouted. “You’re wasting our time! Get the fuck out of here!” Frey walked back through the crowd, which was chanting, “Shame! Shame!” A video clip of their exchange went viral, and on conservative media it played as an example of the extremity of the protests. But Montgomery knew something that Frey and the press did not: she was close to getting the city council to support the call to defund the police. By the next day, in Powderhorn Park, she had it.
In the days after the Powderhorn Park rally, four of the city-council members (Bender, Cano, Cunningham, and Ellison) held a pair of public conversations over Zoom with reporters and national police-reform advocates. Their frustration with the present state of affairs seemed deeply felt: Ellison spoke of wanting to “break the police union.” Their program was less specific. Each of them wanted to redirect some of the police department’s funding to social services, and to have mental-health workers or youth counsellors intervene in most emergencies instead of armed police. On a chat on the side of the Zoom, I could see the questions from reporters lining up: What about the city charter, which required that the city maintain about seventy per cent of the current police force, and could only be amended by a unanimous vote of the city council or a referendum? What about the union contract, which was currently in mediation and stipulated the number of officers who needed to be on patrol? What, most of all, about violence—who would be there when your house was broken into? The council members kept saying that this was going to be a long process, that the details were not yet clear.
When I called around to the individual council members and asked them how they envisioned the future of the police force, they seemed generally to think that a police force would exist only “proportional to enforcement,” as Cunningham put it, and that other roles the police had traditionally played (prevention, intervention, and reëntry) would instead be shifted to small alternative-intervention programs that they hoped to expand. Cano, the chair of the public-safety committee, envisioned a system of community self-reliance, “so you would have an organization of neighbors who respond to issues on the block, maybe one person who needs housing or another who has a mental-health crisis, and so on.” Fletcher said that the 911 algorithm should be changed, so that nonviolent calls could be diverted to social-service departments, and the police could only get involved as a last resort. Bender said that she thought a good model was the CAHOOTS program, which was developed in Eugene, Oregon, and which sends pairs of medics and crisis workers out to emergencies. (The mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, recently announced that she would adapt CAHOOTS for her city.) The idea, as the council members explained it, was not exactly to abolish the police, but to shrink its mission.
In June, the city council began holding a series of public hearings to explore what an alternative model of public safety might look like. “The world isn’t ready for how much Minneapolis loves process,” Fletcher told me. “I think we’ve got to take it to voters if we’re making the kinds of changes we’re proposing, so there’s an opportunity for people to express themselves and for us to make sure we’re reading our constituents right and that we have the mandate to move forward in the way that we are envisioning.” That sounded wise, given both the urgent demand for radical change and the generally fuzzy vision of post-police public safety. But it also emphasized the slight distance that most of the city council members seemed to be keeping from the project of police abolition. “Some of them were dragged into it kicking and screaming,” a Minneapolis political operative who supports the proposal said. Cam Gordon told me, “This was Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block’s baby.”
One of the most fascinating themes of the ascending progressive movement is the way that its idealists and its power players are intertwined. The national media described the Powderhorn Park rally as an effort to radically alter public safety, but they “completely misunderstood what the city council is up to,” Jacobs, the political scientist, told me. Their declaration that they would end, or abolish, or dismantle the police department was, according to Jacobs, “a negotiating position.” The talk of an end to policing as we know it served as a message to the department: remake public safety with us, or we may well try to remake it without you. Javier Morillo, a longtime union leader in Minneapolis, estimated that the progressives have a “twelve-to-eighteen-month window” to solidify the coalition for reform.
Now it seems that the progressives may test the limits of that window. In July, five city-council members introduced a ballot measure to amend the city charter to allow for a radically different approach to public safety. On Wednesday, the city’s charter commission refused, by a 10–5 vote, to allow the measure on November’s ballot, saying that they needed more time to review it. “It’s appropriate to explore transformational changes in the department, but it needs to be done thoughtfully. That hasn’t happened here,” Peter Ginder, one of the charter-commission members, said. The city-council members promised to keep the project going—they could aim for the ballot in 2021—but the decision was a blow to the prospects for radical reform.
If the idea of radically transforming public safety now had a constituency, its details were hard for even its proponents to imagine. Asked on CNN what a person ought to do if she saw someone breaking into her home, Bender said that it was important to recognize that the question “comes from a place of privilege.” She couldn’t see the alternative any more vividly than that. On the same day that the charter commission rejected the ballot proposal, leaving the path for radical reform in Minneapolis uncertain, the city council was holding a hearing on policing alternatives and trying to begin to fill in some specifics.
The real change that Minneapolis signifies may be that the schism between progressive cities and their police has become deep enough that elected Democrats are less willing to straddle it. Five years ago, the progressive New York City Council president Melissa Mark-Viverito proposed adding a thousand police to the streets, even more than the mayor, Bill de Blasio, wanted; this summer, her successor, Corey Johnson, apologized for only cutting the department’s budget by five per cent. In Minneapolis, Bender told me, “I think there was always a question of how the existing police department would respond to folks in the community and elected officials being more honest about what we see—and to watching the city burn while hearing stories about how hard it was to get help.” To Bender, the city had seen the police in a different light, even if they could not yet be persuaded to reinvent it, and had begun to ask some more fundamental questions. She said, “What does it look like to really stand up to this organization that many people in our community are afraid of, and have been for a long time?” At stake, she said, was “what civilian oversight of that department exists, and how effective is it.” Bender asked, “Who is in control?”
A previous version of this piece misstated figures from a budget proposal by Reclaim the Block and the Black Visions Collective.