A6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, OCTOBER 25 , 2021
BY HOLLY BAILEYminneapolis — There are no
memorials to the dead along West
Broadway in north Minneapolis,
but many in this historic heart of
the Black community can point
out where lives have been lost.
There’s the gas station at the
corner of Lyndale Avenue. The
parking lot of the liquor store
across the street. Even Shiloh
Temple, one of the city’s oldest
Black churches, hasn’t been
spared. A gun battle after a funer-
al there in June killed one man
and injured several others. On the
adjacent residential streets, roll-
ing gunfights have sent bullets
flying, further traumatizing resi-
dents after the police killing of
George Floyd.
“It feels like no place is sacred,”
said Brian Herron, a pastor at
nearby Zion Baptist Church,
where residents have sought shel-
ter from gunfire in recent
months. “It has been trauma on
top of trauma on top of trauma.”
Last year, hundreds of people
gathered in the pews here to
mourn Floyd, including scores of
Black residents who shared their
own stories of being treated un-
fairly by police.
But even as Floyd’s murder
sparked urgent calls for police
reform, the question of how to get
there has exposed deep divides
across Minneapolis, exacerbated
by a spike in violent crime. A
Nov. 2 ballot question that would
dramatically reshape the size and
scope of the Minneapolis police
force has fractured the city even
more in the first major electoral
test of the police reform move-
ment since Floyd’s death.
City Question Two, as it is
known, would amend the Minne-
apolis charter to allow the police
department to be replaced by a
Department of Public Safety over-
seen by both the mayor and city
council. The department would
take a “comprehensive public
health approach” to safety, in-
cluding the dispatch of mental
health workers to certain calls
and more investment in violence
prevention efforts.
If approved by voters, the ini-
tiative would remove decades-old
language from the charter requir-
ing a minimum number of police
officers based on the city’s popu-
lation. The new department
“could include” police officers “if
necessary” — wording that has
left some residents afraid the city
would descend into lawlessness.
Authors of the proposed char-
ter amendment insist armed offi-
cers wouldn’t entirely go away
because they are mandated by
Minnesota law to respond to spe-
cific calls. “We’re still going to
have police,” said JaNaé Bates, a
Black reverend and leader of Yes 4
Minneapolis, a coalition of labor,
religious and racial justice groups
that wrote the question and gath-
ered more than 20,000 signatures
to get it on the ballot. “What this
does is give the city more flexibili-
ty in how we approach safety.”
But the measure’s critics say
the initiative’s wording is inten-
tionally vague, leaving out the
words “defund” or “abolish” to
obscure its true meaning. “This
amendment is about abolishing
the police,” said Sondra Samuels,
a Black activist from north Min-
neapolis who was part of a group
that unsuccessfully sued to get
the question off the ballot. “It has
nothing to do with safety and
systemic change.”
The ballot question comes af-
ter a majority of the Minneapolis
City Council took the stage at a
rally days after Floyd’s death and
pledged to dismantle the police
department — a dramatic state-
ment that reverberated across the
country, becoming an issue in
political races big and small.
“All eyes are on Minneapolis,”
said Mayor Jacob Frey, who is
simultaneously running for a sec-
ond term in office and against the
charter amendment on policing,
which he argues will send a city
already struggling with violent
crime into further distress.
“We need deep structural re-
form and change.... But here in
Minneapolis, we have the fewest
officers per capita than just about
any major city in the entire coun-
try,” said Frey, who currently has
sole oversight of the police de-
partment as mayor. “The notion
of further reducing our officer
count just does not make sense.”
But Sheila Nezhad, an organiz-
er and one of more than a dozen
candidates trying to unseat Frey,
said the city had spent years
trying to enact police reforms in a
department that has been resis-
tant to change. Nezhad’s organi-
zation, Reclaim the Block, has
advocated for a “police-free fu-
ture” and helped write the ballot
language.
“We’ve been reforming, and
things aren’t getting better,” Ne-
zhad said. “We need bigger solu-
tions.”
The debate has also drawn
attention from outside the city —
sharply dividing state and nation-
al Democrats along ideological
lines in an election that could
have implications far beyond
Minneapolis as the party looks to
the 2022 midterms and the 2024
presidential race.
The state’s best known Demo-
cratic liberals — U.S. Rep. Ilhan
Omar and Minnesota Attorney
General Keith Ellison, both of
whom live in Minneapolis — have
come out in favor of the question,
while other top Democrats —including Gov. Tim Walz and U.S.
Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina
Smith, who also live in Minneap-
olis — oppose it. And while the
White House has not formally
weighed in on the measure, advis-
ers to President Biden are work-
ing on opposite sides of the fight.
Less than two weeks before
Election Day, people on both
sides of the ballot question say
things remain unpredictable,
pointing to private polling and
data from citywide canvassing
that suggests residents are deeply
split on the question — with
many undecided even as early
voting has begun.
In one of the few public surveys
on the issue, a September poll of
800 Minneapolis likely voters by
the Star Tribune, Minnesota Pub-
lic Radio, KARE 11 and PBS’s
“Frontline” found that 49 percent
supported replacing the MPD
with a new department of public
safety; 41 percent were opposed,
while 10 percent were undecided.
Yet 55 percent also said Minne-
apolis “should not reduce” the
size of the police force — includ-
ing 75 percent of Black residents
and 51 percent of White residents.
On the city’s north side, decid-
ing how to vote on Question Two
is particularly fraught. Many here
say there needs to be reform in a
police department long accused
of racism and abuse, but they are
fearful of what this particular
ballot language would mean in a
city suffering through a “pandem-
ic of violence.”
“Nobody disagrees that the cul-
ture of policing and policing in
and of itself needs to be trans-
formed,” Herron said. “And yet
with the violence in our commu-
nity, it is unconscionable right
now to talk about abolishing the
police without a concrete plan of
public safety.” Members of his
congregation complain of police
mistreatment, he said, but also
acknowledge they need to be able
to call police when crime strikes,
as it has with disturbing frequen-
cy in the months since Floyd’s
death.
There have been at least 80
homicides so far this year inMinneapolis — a number on pace
to break records set in the 1990s,
when the city was dubbed “Mur-
derapolis” during a spike in
crime. Almost half have occurred
on the north side. More than 530
people across the city have been
shot, including young children
who have been fatally wounded
in the crossfire and whose kill-
ings remain unsolved.
The uptick in crime has coin-
cided with a slowdown in police
response, which the department
blames on staffing shortages.
Since Floyd’s death on May 25,
2020, nearly 300 officers have left
the department — many claiming
post-traumatic stress disorder
from the fiery protests that erupt-
ed after his killing. According to
numbers presented to the city
council this month, 588 officers
were working at the department
as of Sept. 30 — down from the
888 positions that had been fund-
ed last year.
Police Chief Medaria Arradon-
do told the city council during an
Oct. 18 budget hearing the officer
departures were equal to the loss
of staffing an entire police pre-
cinct. As of this week, just 307
officers were available to respond
to 911 calls — “the lowest num-
ber” he could recall in his more
than 30 years with the depart-
ment, Arradondo said.
Some residents have also ac-
cused the MPD of a deliberate
slowdown in service in protest of
the debate over policing — an
allegation Arradondo has strong-
ly denied.
“In many ways, we are already
experiencing what it would feel
like to have less police,” said
Herron, who, along with clergy
from other Black churches in
north Minneapolis, have taken to
patrolling the streets in the ab-
sence of police in recent months
in an effort to calm tensions and
curb violence.
Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civ-
il rights attorney and activist
from north Minneapolis who
heads the Racial Justice Network,
ended weeks of speculation Tues-
day when she announced in a
nearly hour-long Facebook videothat she would vote against ques-
tion two.
Armstrong, a former mayoral
candidate, cited the uncertainty
of what the ballot question would
mean for public safety — especial-
ly for Black communities that
often “bear the brunt” of violence
both from police and community
members.
“Why nearly a year and a half
after George Floyd was killed do
we not have a written plan of
what we are voting for?” Arm-
strong said.
But she was equally critical of
Frey and city council members
who she said had not done
enough to improve police ac-
countability. “It’s basically a false
dichotomy between keep MPD
the way it is and tinker around
the edges and call it reform or
come up with a whole new de-
partment with a lot of unan-
swered questions and uncertain-
ty and the need to trust people
who haven’t earned our trust,”
Armstrong said.
But D.A. Bullock, an activist
and filmmaker who lives in north
Minneapolis and supports the
ballot question, pointed to re-
cently released body camera vid-
eos showing Minneapolis police
officers “hunting” and firing on
people with rubber bullets during
protests after Floyd’s death as a
sign of the aggressive culture that
residents have long suffered from
a department that has resisted
change.
Even in the aftermath of for-
mer officer Derek Chauvin’s con-
viction for murder in Floyd’s kill-
ing, “they have not kept us safe,”
Bullock argued at a recent forum
sponsored by the Racial Justice
Network, describing it as an “in-
sult” to Black people to suggest
that more officers are the solution
to the city’s public safety prob-
lems.
“Now they’ve got us in a posi-
tion of desperation, where we’re
begging for the same low quality,”
Bullock said of the violence that
has erupted across the city in the
last year.
“Nobody is saying that this
charter amendment is providingall the change,” Bullock added.
“But if you don’t remove the
[officer minimum] in the charter,
what magical thinking makes us
believe that we’re going to have a
legitimate investment in preven-
tion and intervention?”
City council members who
support the proposal — including
Jeremiah Ellison and Phillipe
Cunningham, two Black lawmak-
ers who represent north Minne-
apolis — have pushed back on
critics who question the lack of a
“plan,” pointing to guidance from
the city attorney who warned
elected officials that using city
resources to draft potential policy
language could violate ethics
laws.
The debate has also played out
among racial and geographical
lines — with many Black resi-
dents of north Minneapolis ac-
cusing liberal White residents of
south Minneapolis of supporting
“an experiment” that could prove
harmful to Black residents as
they are trying to be better allies
in the aftermath of Floyd’s death.
“If this thing, if this vote pass-
es, it will pass because a lot of
well-meaning progressive White
people in south Minneapolis real-
ly want to be anti-racist,” Samuels
said. “And they feel like if they
miss this opportunity, they won’t
be allies to us.”
While Yes 4 Minneapolis found
support citywide for getting the
proposed charter amendment on
the ballot, the highest number of
signatures in support of the
measure came from residents in
the south Minneapolis neighbor-
hoods near where Floyd was
killed. There, White people in
neighborhoods known as havens
for liberal activists faced a reck-
oning of their own after Floyd’s
death.
Erika Thorne, a longtime liber-
al activist who lives about five
blocks from 38th and Chicago,
the intersection where Floyd was
killed, recalled how neighbors
organized block meetings to talk
about the “sometimes tense” is-
sues of race and social justice.
Many residents vowed to stop
calling police, fearful of putting
their neighbors of color at risk.
It’s a pledge that Thorne has
held to, even as shooting has
erupted in front of her home
three times in recent months.
Thorne, who supports the pro-
posed charter amendment and
has been knocking on doors
across the city on behalf of Yes 4
Minneapolis, said she has consid-
ered the criticism from Samuels
and others. But she pointed to
other Black activists in the com-
munity who argue the opposite —
that a vote for the measure will
ultimately make the city safer for
all residents, including people of
color.
“I am both moved and con-
vinced by Black people who are
saying reforms that everybody
lobbied for have not actually
helped the situation,” Thorne
said. “We are not seeing the level
of change in the MPD that would
need to happen for them to stop
murdering unarmed Black men,
as well as hurting and harming all
kinds of people.”
Many of her neighbors remain
traumatized by Floyd’s death and
the events that happened after-
ward, when blocks of nearby Lake
Street were burned, covering the
neighborhood in ash and smoke.
“The sheer brutality of his killing
and what followed... there were
uprisings in lots of places, but
here, it was this visceral thing and
continues to be,” Thorne said.
“People worry there will be an-
other George Floyd.”
[email protected]Minneapolis is split over police overhaul ballot initiative
MOHAMED IBRAHIM/REPORT FOR AMERICA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Aurin Chowdhury of the Minnesota Youth Collective addresses a crowd of supporters of Minneapolis’s public safety ballot initiative at a
rally on Sept. 17. The proposal would replace the city’s police force with a new public safety department.Some worry the measure
is too vague and could
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