Mayor’s office is still not heeding the community on Minneapolis Third Precinct site

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For more than four years the former site of Minneapolis’ Third Precinct has been a daily reminder of the unrest that shook the city in late May 2020. It is also a reminder of the city’s continuing lack of interest and inability to engage honestly and fairly with South Siders.

An organization that I co-founded, Confluence: An East Lake Studio for Community Design, has spent three years organizing spaces and processes for neighborhood residents to participate in reimagining the former precinct site. We are now forming a coalition of south Minneapolis community organizations to challenge the current proposal by Mayor Jacob Frey for the site: a “democracy center” intended for warehousing voting machines and for offices for election services workers; thrown into the mix is an undefined space for community use. In a sadly unsurprising move, the mayor’s latest proposal was crafted with no democratic engagement of our communities. This is a strategy we are all too familiar with.

In the last three years the city has supplied no answers, no initiatives and, most jarringly, has requested no input regarding the future of the site from neighbors most directly affected by the sites past and present. For readers who have not attended any of the city-led listening sessions about the future of the precinct, the meetings prioritized city officials telling us what the mayor’s vision was, but they failed to engage neighbors as the true visionaries and future stewards of what would be built.

To this day the site remains surrounded by concrete barricades, steel fencing and barbed wire. It’s an eyesore to many who pass by, an artistic canvas for neighbors striving to imagine a more meaningful use for the grounds and, for South Siders living close to E. Lake Street who experienced firsthand the chaos of that last week in May 2020, as well as the many decades of violence and disregard perpetrated by officers stationed at the Third Precinct, this abandoned site is a reminder of how the voices of South Side neighbors are so easily and generationally dismissed. It is a site of complex grief and frustration.

After three years of utter silence, in April 2023, with no prior input, the city gave the neighborhoods patrolled by the Third Precinct two choices: to choose, for tens of millions of dollars, option “A” for a new precinct, or for a lesser dollar figure, option “B” and allow MPD to move back into its former home at 3000 Minnehaha Av. The hundreds of neighbors who attended this series of so-called “listening sessions” to review these proposals resoundingly and diversely said “no” to either proposal.

From my experience at these meetings, as well as at previous gatherings organized by neighborhood associations such as the Longfellow Community Council and other groups, including Confluence, it has been abundantly clear that most neighbors insist that any return to that site, and return to the neighborhood, requires an accounting and redress of the Minneapolis Police Department’s past, in particular the negligent and brutal relationship the Third Precinct has with residents. This sentiment finds common cause from neighbors who very much want a return of the MPD to the neighborhood, as well as those who desire a radical transformation of security altogether.

While it seems that the MPD’s return to having a precinct in the neighborhood is a foregone conclusion despite neighbors’ calls for some form of authentic reconciliation before those steps are taken, through community action the department will not return to the old Third Precinct site. Regardless, the call to mindfully consider the future of the site in deeper partnership with our communities remains unheeded by the current mayor’s administration. To help readers understand why a collective, community-led reimagining of the future of the former precinct is demanded so strongly, I want to offer some perspective.

On Friday, May 29, 2020, the night after the precinct burned, the chaos lost its focus on the precinct site and soon fanned out across the neighborhood. My house shook. The noise was overwhelming and percussive, fueled overwhelmingly by police concussion grenades and ricocheting rubber bullets. The fumes from the fires were noxious. Charred debris lay in my and my neighbors front yards. That Friday night I finally called Jacob Frey directly on his cell after the roar on the streets became too much to comprehend. I remember shouting into the phone at him: “Jacob, what the hell is going on? What are you finally going to do about this?” His response, “Sam, we’re overwhelmed. There’s nothing we can do right now. I’m so sorry.”

Up to that point I’d been attempting to relay information and advice to the mayor through proxies. Once I got off the phone with him I started calling my neighbors.

The next morning, I along with a few others called on our neighbors to gather in Powderhorn Park. We knew no one else was there to help and that we needed to come up with solutions. About a thousand neighbors arrived over two days. Fire hoses, home fire extinguishers, knowledge and personal skills were sourced and distributed. Neighbors created a living map of the neighborhood that day in the park, organizing into block groups, some which remain in close communication now. Later that first day my neighbors down the block used that surplus fire equipment to save a fellow neighbors’ home when a business next door caught fire, putting out the flames that the fire department couldn’t get to in time.

Beginning in fall 2021, my organization, Confluence Studio, began hosting people’s assemblies, in part very much inspired by our experience in Powderhorn Park. Our first assembly was in support of efforts to transform the Police Department into a department of public safety that, possibly, would have been better positioned to respond to the complex safety needs of our neighborhoods. Our first assembly was held in the parking lot of the precinct. From the start the future of the precinct loomed large, this included the potential of the site as a model to imagine different futures. Neighbors at that October 2021 assembly and future gatherings all independently latched on to the idea of the barricaded building acting as a way to think through complex problems around security, care and holistic neighborhood engagement. Inspired by this organic phenomenon, Confluence Studio launched an autonomous request for proposals (A-RFP) in May 2024, inviting professionals, neighbors and young people to reimagine the former precinct through the lens of “authentic security,” meaning safety that is not based on a culture of fear, violence or social control, but mutual support and care.

In the months since its launch, the A-RFP and assemblies and workshops associated with that work have engaged and supported hundreds of neighbors in conversation. For pennies on the dollar our scrappy organization, in collaboration with neighbors, has hosted more direct and substantive gatherings with neighbors regarding the future of the precinct site than the city has in four years time. The A-RFP is proof of concept that grassroots, democratic engagement, using tools for imagining and critical thinking, can help us arrange new and truly supportive civic structures.

Now we are moving on to stage two of this work, accessing the framework we’ve already established to support a far broader coalition of neighborhood organizations and groups to put tools in the hands of neighbors to imagine the future of the precinct site as a working model of community care. A model that will attempt to authentically engage a cross section of neighbors and create democratic space for continued dialogue, supporting an ethos of interconnection and shared responsibility. We’re confident in our ability to work together toward this aim because, as a neighborhood, we’ve been here before.

Despite the city’s avoidance of the subject, what is clear to almost anyone is that the former Third Precinct is a building with a fraught and volatile history. What is less clear is that the site’s uncertain future offers us an opportunity to rethink what security means and what it can be for our communities more broadly and holistically than we have previously allowed ourselves. The site, in all its complexity, is an object lesson inviting us to collectively consider a far more broad definition of security than we’re used to. One rooted in care and support for all neighbors. The future of the former precinct site is a generational opportunity. It is imperative we work together toward that challenge or risk repeating shameful past experiences.

Sam Gould is the co-founder and director of Confluence: An East Lake Studio for Community Design. A news conference announcing the transition to phase two of Confluence Studio’s autonomous request for proposals (A-RFP), involving a broader coalition of neighbors and neighborhood partners, will be announced outside the former Third Precinct site on Sept. 24. The application for phase one of the Studio’s A-RFP closes on Sept. 27. The application portal can be found on the Studio’s website, confluence-studio.org.