Voters in US city of Minneapolis reject ‘defund the police’ plan

By Andy Roesgen

CHICAGO, US (AA) - Voters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where George Floyd's murder by a police officer triggered worldwide demonstrations, rejected a proposal Tuesday to essentially dissolve the current police department.

With nearly all the votes in by late evening, the proposal had been rejected by 56% to 44%, or about 76,000 votes to 58,000 votes. The vote was closely watched around the nation, as activists in other cities hoped to emulate the proposal.

The proposal called for altering the city's charter to replace the police department with a new "Department of Public Safety" that would take a "comprehensive public health approach" to dealing with nonviolent crime. But the specifics of how the new department would operate would have been left up to the mayor and the city council to determine.

The death of Floyd, an African American, under then-police officer Derek Chauvin's knee, caught on cell phone video for about nine minutes in May 2020, stunned the nation and set off days of rioting in Minneapolis.

In the days after Floyd's death, a shell-shocked Minneapolis Mayor, Jacob Frey, was booed at a Black Lives Matter rally when he said he favored deep structural changes in the police department but not "defunding" it or replacing it. Frey is running for re-election, and late on Tuesday, it appeared that he was on his way to holding his seat.

Critics said the police department had a history of racism, and shortly after Floyd's death, the Minneapolis City Council vowed to defund the department. That plan fell apart, but months later, the city council voted to divert millions of dollars from the police department to other city services.

But in the months afterward, morale at the police department sank, and hundreds of Minneapolis police officers left the force. In fact, in 2021, the city has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to advertise for job openings in the police department.

Crime in the city, as in other major US cities this year, has spiked. In particular, Minneapolis is seeing a rash of carjackings. Supporters of the city's "defund the police" proposal say the crime spike is happening under the status quo of the current system, which is why they wanted the system replaced.