Minneapolis residents rejected an amendment on Tuesday to replace the police department with the new Department of Public Safety, the NY Times reports.
After the death of George Floyd, some residents felt the policing system could not be improved and there were calls to defund the police.
The people want improvements in policing but they don’t want less police, they want more.
Minneapolis leaders now face the challenge of filling staffing shortages in a Police Department that is about a third smaller than it was before Mr. Floyd’s killing, and at a time when the city is facing the most homicides since the mid-1990s. Even though voters were bitterly divided over the charter amendment, the city has been largely united in a view that meaningful reforms to policing are needed.
“We all agree that we can’t sustain as we are now with the way policing has been,” said Brian Herron, the pastor of a church on the city’s North Side and an opponent of the amendment. But he added: “We don’t have time to reimagine. We got bodies dropping in the streets. We got innocent folk being killed.”
Supporters of the measure had framed it as an opportunity to rethink law enforcement and perhaps become a national model for a different approach.
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