Police contract delivers change for Minneapolis residents and officers

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Minneapolis is at the forefront of change in policing and community safety in this country. From formally establishing a new comprehensive model for community safety to a court agreement that provides the framework for lasting change, the people of Minneapolis and our entire local government have embraced reform and begun the hard work of redefining what safety looks like in our city. Together, we are embarking on a journey that will fundamentally change the way we do business for future generations.

That same push for progress guided our city’s approach to negotiating a new police contract.

With 40% fewer officers today than this time four years ago, Minneapolis is at an inflection point. That’s why we approached negotiating this contract with a willingness to think bigger on both changes to the contract and officer pay.

For decades, city officials have gradually given away managerial oversight to the police union in exchange for modest pay increases. The results: limited authority for police chiefs to manage a culture they were charged with shifting and limited ability to recruit and retain officers with below-market pay.

Even before negotiations for a new police contract began nine months ago, it was clear that we would need to approach negotiations differently. That’s why last year we hosted a series of listening sessions across Minneapolis that sought community input to guide the city’s priorities and included several City Council members on the labor negotiations workgroup. Thanks to months of input from residents across our city, we developed and successfully pushed the union to agree to significant reforms.

The city fought for and secured increased transparency, accountability and oversight. This agreement moves us in the right direction by:

• Giving the chief more discretion over job assignments and staffing requirements, so that the department can assign officers to areas of the greatest need and make promotions based on candidate readiness rather than arbitrary staffing percentages.

• Ending old and outdated side agreements and zipping up all of the written agreements into the contract so the city, the union and the public know exactly what has been agreed to in writing at the start of the term of the contract.

• Getting the union to agree that we can use non-sworn employees for investigative work, which will allow the chief to put more officers on the street focused on critical safety work instead of sitting behind a desk.

These are just a few key ways this contract answers the call for change. Taken together, these terms will increase the tools available to the chief of police to instill accountability and shift the culture.

This contract can also help us deliver on change residents from across every neighborhood are rightly demanding: replenishing the ranks. The downward trend in officer staffing is not going to correct itself, and the raises negotiated in this contract will help Minneapolis compete for a limited pool of candidates.

The increased pay and financial incentives will help give Minneapolis and the MPD an opportunity to stabilize staffing levels, which would in turn reduce reliance on overtime to fill shifts and response times to get to people who need help. Overreliance on overtime is a cycle that leads to burnout, causing more officers to leave and fewer potential applicants wanting to apply. This exacerbates the staffing crisis we are already experiencing. Making pay competitive is not a nice-to-have — it’s a need-to-have for the overall health of our city’s safety ecosystem.

Does this contract deliver on every change we sought? No, of course not. It is a contract negotiation, and compromise is the essence of this work. After months of engagement, good faith negotiations with the union and hard-fought reforms secured, this contract represents an opportunity to deliver meaningful change in policing and deliver more than lip service to the police officers who go to work every day to help make Minneapolis safer.

We are a city of progress. Further delaying this contract is not progress; voting on it is. We encourage City Council members to vote yes and to vote yes now.

Jacob Frey is mayor of Minneapolis. Todd Barnette is community safety commissioner. Brian O’Hara is chief of police.