Minneapolis Lawmakers Deny They Support ‘Defund the Police’ after $8M in Budget Cuts
Two Minneapolis city council members are denying their support for the “defund the police” movement, after previously calling for the dismantling of the Minnesota police department and having voted to shift $8 million from the police budget just days before.
City council member Steve Fletcher told local news station KSTP-TV that “‘defund’ is not the framework the council has ever chosen,” and instead said the police budget cuts were undertaken to fulfill the funding needs of other programs.
Fletcher and eight other city council members attended an event in June where they stood behind a “defund police” sign and pledged to dismantle the police department in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody in May.
Council member Phillipe Cunningham agreed with Fletcher, telling the station that “it’s important to name that dismantle does not mean dismantle into nothing.”
“It means dismantling what we currently have to build something new,” he added.
Fletcher said the city’s residents were calling on elected officials “to do something really hard – to transform a system that’s existed more than a hundred years.”
“The thing that we care about is, what’s the system we’re designing that’s better?” Fletcher said. “And yes, if we design a better system that’s going to mean investing less in traditional armed law enforcement because we’re relying less on that.”
The council members’ comments come one week after the council unanimously approved a budget that will take roughly $8 million from the police department’s $179 million budget to be used toward violence prevention and mental health programs.
The budget cuts follow a summer of surging crime and widespread rioting over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody in May. More than 500 people have been shot in the city this year, according to police data, twice as many as 2019. Murders have spiked more than 50 percent, while the city has seen nearly 5,000 violent crimes, the highest level in five years.
At the June event, city council president Lisa Bender said “efforts at incremental reform have failed” and that she and her fellow council members in attendance were committed to ending the city’s relationship with the police force and “to end policing as we know it and recreate systems that actually keep us safe.”
Fletcher said this week that the council’s goal was not “to maximize how much money came out of the department.”
“If we’re going to look at how we fund different programs, it would be very hard to do that without taking that money from the Minneapolis Police Department,” he said. “There’s very little elsewhere in the city where it feels like there’s money to be taken.”
The budget cuts didn’t involve cutting any officers or any “single tangible thing on the street,” he said.
“What it cut was a massive increase in overtime that they had proposed and that felt like bloat in the budget,” Fletcher said.
However, the city council had initially planned to cut the city’s police force from 888 to 750 officers beginning in 2022, only choosing not to carry out the cuts after Mayor Jacob Frey threatened to veto the entire budget if the cuts were carried out.
