From promise to reality: transforming public safety in Minneapolis

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Just over four years ago, the world watched in horror a video recorded at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue S. in Minneapolis of a police officer murdering George Floyd, sparking the largest U.S. protest movement on record. Facing calls from activists to defund the police, the Minneapolis City Council promised to build a “transformative” new model of public safety. Yet today the Minneapolis Police Department remains intact, with an even larger budget. And despite city leaders’ promises of reforms through the union bargaining process, the City Council recently approved a contract that instead gives officers a nearly 22% pay increase over the next three years.

Why does policing seem so resistant to change? There are several answers as to why police seem to win in these negotiations, including the steep spike in homicides Minneapolis saw in 2020 and 2021 and the continued wave of officers leaving since 2020, both of which pushed the city to appease the union. There’s also a deeper answer as to why the police as an institution have been able to buffer against external control through the decades. It’s because the police actively work to shape their political influence. Indeed, for several decades, the Police Department has strategically grown its political muscle to shape city (and state) politics.

But it’s not just the police and their leaders who are responsible. It’s us. It is the public that initiates half of all police stops nationally, calling 911 to request law enforcement to solve the everyday problems of disorder, from “Permit Patty” to shots fired. More abstractly, the police win power every time the public calls on them as the solution to various urban crises, including the housing crisis, the overdose crisis and especially the crisis of violence. It is this vision of police as the default responder that led to the failure of the 2021 charter amendment proposal to replace the Police Department with a Department of Public Safety and that more recently brought residents to City Hall to testify in support of the police union contract.

These failures also hint at the solution: To transform public safety, we must displace police as the catch-all solution to urban problems, both in practice and in the hearts and minds of the public. Over the past four years, city leaders, nonprofits and other organizations, activists and everyday residents in Minneapolis have been working to do just that by designing experiments in safety.

Most impressive in terms of diverting 911 calls to other agencies has been the city’s behavioral crisis response (BCR) team, run by the majority Black-owned mental health organization Canopy Roots. The BCR launched in late 2021 after years of planning. The goal was to provide a new model of compassionate emergency response for the kinds of mental health and behavioral health crises for which police have few useful tools, such as calls about an individual acting disoriented or disruptive in public and welfare checks on neighbors and family members. Instead of sending handcuffs and weapons to such calls, the BCR sends in first responders with mental health and crisis training. And rather than focusing on law enforcement in such situations, the BCR responders focus on how to support vulnerable community members in place, including building robust safety plans to prevent harm to self and others.

For the past year, the BCR team has served the city 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — now answering nearly 900 calls per month — with zero significant injuries to either staff or members of the public. These responses are still only a small fraction of all 911 calls per week in Minneapolis (and, of course, the BCR operates on a fraction of the Police Department’s budget and staff). But it is a proof of concept, showing that the city can develop new response models that better support the community and help police focus on the kinds of calls most appropriate to their skills.

There are other models, too — including the city’s violence interruption work, which unfortunately seems to have stalled over the past year. Violence interruption is premised on the idea that we can fund community members to intervene in cycles of violence in their own neighborhoods. Often staffed by formerly incarcerated men who want to give back to a community they harmed as young people, violence interrupters can form a visible presence on the streets on “hot” blocks and in the lives of the people most likely to perpetrate violence, helping them to build a new path out. Yet in order to work, such groups must be consistently funded and supported.

None of these experiments in safety will automatically solve our urban crises any more than sending in police has solved violence in America. But what they can do is reorient how we as a city respond to human suffering, sending in support and resources in lieu of handcuffs and criminalization where possible. And in doing so, they can serve as at least a partial answer to the question of how to secure justice for Floyd.

Police reform, as we’ve seen throughout the decades in Minneapolis, is a long and difficult task, prone to failures and backsliding. It seems unlikely that the city will win major concessions in the union negotiations to come, although the new flexibility to expand civilian investigator positions in the revised union contract is a start. We can also work to help make sure the ongoing work of reform is pushed forward through the ongoing consent decrees with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights and U.S. Department of Justice. But so, too, do Minneapolis residents need to push for the broader vision of public safety demanded in summer 2020 that not only builds a better model of policing, but more holistic approaches to suffering. In a city in which mental health professionals, violence prevention specialists and public health administrators are called in alongside the police to respond to crisis, we all have a better chance of getting the answer right.

Michelle S. Phelps is professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota and the author of “The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America.” She is on the community advisory board for Canopy Roots’ behavioral crisis response program.