MINNEAPOLIS CITY COUNCIL BEWILDERED BY CRIME SPIKE AFTER DEFUNDING THE POLICE

Only two months ago, the Minneapolis City Council unanimously voted to disband the police department, and on Wednesday those same council members were dumbstruck during a meeting regarding rising crime in their city. 

Council members grilled police Chief Medaria Arradondo about the surge in crimes including daytime carjackings, robberies, violent assaults, shootings, and street racing.

“Residents are asking, ‘Where are the police?'” said Council Member Jamal Osman, citing that constituents’ calls to the Minneapolis Police Department are now being ignored. “That is the only public safety option they have at the moment. MPD. They rely on MPD. And they are saying they are nowhere to be seen.”

Council President Lisa Bender charged Minneapolis cops with intentionally refusing to enforce laws and neglecting to make arrests.

“This is not new,” Bender said. “But it is very concerning in the current context.”

Arradondo, who first took up his post as police chief in 2017, called her remarks “troubling to hear” and vowed to tackle the concern with his departmental supervisors.

“We need to make sure that our communities know that we are going to be there, that we’re going to be responsive,” he told the council. “We’ve taken an oath to do that.”

Minnesota Public Radio reports that the Minneapolis Police Department’s data on crime shows an increase in assaults, robberies, and homicides in addition to property crimes and arson. In the first nine months of 2020, more lives have been lost to violent crime than all murders reported for the previous year.

Arradondo informed the council that roughly 100 officers have resigned from the department or have taken a leave of absence since the beginning of 2020, which is more than twice the usual number of cops who either walk away from the department or are inactive, according to MPR.

The council began eliminating the city’s police department in July. This included the passage of an amendment to take away $1 million from the police department’s budget and transferring resources to the health department to take on “violence interrupters” tasked with smoothing out potentially violent situations.

“If we have these systems in place we are getting ahead of the violence,” Council member Phillipe Cunningham said. “That’s why I have advocated so strongly for the violence interrupters, because if they are interrupting the violence before the guns are being fired, then the MPD doesn’t have to respond to that violence.”

The council had promised earlier this past summer to take apart the police department and substitute it with a community-based system of public safety in a reaction to leftist mob outrage and national media attention.

“What I am sort of flabbergasted by right now is colleagues, who a very short time ago were calling for abolition, are now suggesting we should be putting more resources and funding into MPD,” Cunningham griped.

The council started zeroing in on police reorganization after 46-year-old George Floyd died while high on a cocktail of drugs in the custody of Minneapolis police officers who were blamed for causing his death while trying to restrain him. 

The death of Floyd went viral from a bystander’s video that circulated on social media as well as news across the country and world. The public reacted with violent protests, assaults in the street, and vast property damage that stretched across the nation. The officers who were involved in the incident were terminated from their jobs the day after Floyd’s death. One of the officers, Derek Chauvin, is now facing charges of second-degree murder, whereas the three remaining officers who were on the scene have been charged with aiding and abetting.

All four of the officers are scheduled to appear in court Friday.