50 Time August 17/August 24, 2020
Nation
cut by $150 million, the NYPD’s by $1 billion. The
amounts may be invested instead in social pro-
grams, perhaps even for more than a fiscal cycle.
But only the City of Lakes appears intent on what
its city council terms a “transformative new model
for cultivating safety.” The Minneapolis council’s
June 12 resolution called for a full year of study, “cen-
tering... stakeholders who have been historically
marginalized or under served by our present system.”
After moving very quickly—“It all just happened so
fast, to be honest,” says Cunningham—the idea is to
proceed deliberately and consult widely.
“The only way we can solve this problem is, you
gotta talk to me,” says Olivia Pinex , who was working
at a south Minneapolis food bank on one recent day.
“There’s a lot of solutions inside the community, but
the problem is the police officers want to kill us first
and then talk to our family. How about we talk first?”
No matter how that conversation goes, noth-
ing substantial can happen without a change in the
city charter. Getting a referendum to that effect in
front of voters is a complicated process, opposed by
Mayor Jacob Frey, who would lose line authority over
the police department—and by the powerful police
union. Also working against the council is a wave of
violence: “gunfire incidents” in Minneapolis were
up 224% in June and 166% in July, compared with a
year earlier. At the moment, voters may feel they face
a choice as stark as the contrasts on display along the
corridor of Lake Street, where the plywood on store-
fronts alternates between elaborately rendered mes-
sages of aspiration (Unlearning WhiTeness) and
desperate pleas (Don’T BUrn and KiDs live here).
With nothing in between.
“The people who stoked this fire of ‘defund,’ they
need another way to say it,” says Houston White,
who owns a luxe barber shop on the north side. “It’s
a PR and narrative nightmare. This is such a fragile
discussion.” White, for instance, says he would pre-
fer that a call about a loud stereo not be answered by
“an officer with his hand on a gun.” But he also re-
members his troubled youth and says the threat of
arrest helped scare him straight.
In truth, not even activists who call for “abolition”
expect the police to vanish. “I don’t think that
the Minneapolis police department will be gone
even next year, even in five years,” Black Visions
Collective’s Omeoga says. “But it’s a transition. We
know that this system is not working for us.” If a
referendum to change the city charter does pass (or
if the process takes so long that the question doesn’t
get in front of voters until November 2021), the
council will have more time to try to bring around
skeptics, some of whom are indignant at not being
consulted already. One is McAfee. The preacher casts
the Black Lives Matter generation— intersectional
and independent and often younger—as at once
naive and rigid.
And yet McAfee seems to be on the same page
as many Black Lives Matter activists. He arrived at
his interview with TIME in sweats, having rushed
to a home where a gang member was on the edge
of violence. He had organized volunteers to stand
between protesters and the north side’s own police
precinct, and Minneapolis police confirm asking
him to provide security at George Floyd’s memorial
service. Years ago, McAfee says, “we had an on-call
thing” that brought a “community- response team”
to hospitals to head off retaliation after someone
in the neighborhood was injured by another. That
program was successful, he says, because the peo-
ple have learned what works—they had to, given
the risk of summoning police.
“What we’ve done for years is what the hell
they’re talking about doing,” McAfee concludes.
It’s not so easy to formalize such arrangements
into a municipal system. A buy-in from the current
police chief would help (though it is highly unlikely,
given his obligations to the mayor). As a Black veteran
of the Minneapolis department widely admired for
his efforts to change its culture, Medaria Arradondo
is cited by activists as proof that the problem is the
system, not individuals. But there will still be a place
for cops in a new paradigm, and Cunningham recalls
telling Arradondo, “I want you to know that while I
don’t necessarily believe in reform, I believe in you.
So if you could build your ideal force, if you did not
inherit this system, what would that look like?”Some have been looking east—to Camden, N.J.,
widely regarded as the current exemplar of change
in urban policing.
There, Pyne Poynt Park, home of the North Cam-
den Little League, presents a clear view of the Phila-
delphia skyline. On a mid-July day, as temperatures
inched above 90°F, Bryan Morton, a community
activist who runs the league, offered a group of his
older players reminders from the sidelines as they
warmed up and got ready for practice: “Don’t forget
the pitching machine. Y’all know the layout.” Mor-
ton started the league in 2011 in response to the high
crime rates in Camden, as a way to give kids some-
thing to do. At the time, he says, none of the parks
in the neighborhood were safe for kids to play in.
The ball field’s waterside position is a little re-
moved from Camden’s downtown, but the problems
within the city had their way of reaching the park.
Sometimes when it was time for practices to start,
drug dealers would still be using the same space to
sell. “Shoot-outs were common; high- caliber weap-
onry was the norm,” he says.
At around the time when the league was launched,
Camden, which is majority-nonwhite and nearly half
Black, was one of the poorest cities in the state, with
a 2012 median household income of about $22,000
and a poverty rate of about 40%. It also had among