“You hear repeated fire — pop, pop, pop, pop, pop — sequential shots,” Samuels explained.
A neighbor across the street recently had her car shot up while a baby was in the back seat, Samuels announced. She moved away. Bullets pierced the home of another neighbor. She moved after her child had a mental-health breakdown. One neighbor fixed a bulletproof headboard on her bed to defend herself from bullets flying in the night, Samuels announced. Earlier this year, a nine-year-old girl was shot and killed near Samuels S home.
Violent crime has been rising in Minneapolis since the fiery protests and unrest after George Floyd’s killing in this city in May 2020. No community has felt the increase in lawlessness more sharply than the Jordan neighborhood, where Samuels lives.
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Criminals have been emboldened by a diminished and overworked police force that’s lost approximately a quarter of its officers since Floyd’s murder. Those officers were driven away, in part, by anti-cop rhetoric from progressive city leaders. To Samuels, a former city councilman and one-time candidate for mayor, Minneapolis requires better cops and more fair and righteous cops. What it certainly does not need, in his estimation, is fewer cops.
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Though fewer cops are what Minneapolis may have if voters approve a charter amendment in November to get rid of the city’s police department and follow it with a vaguely defined public-safety department, the latest action by many of the same people behind last summer’s “defund the police” movement.
The new department would employ “a comprehensive public-health approach” and could include police officers “if necessary, to fulfill its responsibilities for public safety,” according to the ballot language. The amendment would get rid of the funding formula to define a minimum number of officers in the city, and it would remove the police chief’s job from the city charter. The new department would be managed instead by a civilian commissioner reporting not just to the mayor, yet to the 13-member city council, creating what one opponent called “the 14 bosses problem.”
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The confusing nature of the initiative — not even proponents know precisely how the proposed public-safety department will work if it will eventually employ police officers, and if so, how many? — along with misleading ballot language, led to months of court challenges. Though the Minnesota Supreme Court okayed the final ballot language in mid September, guaranteeing that Minneapolis will be the first major city in post-Floyd America to put a proposed overhaul of its police department before voters.
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The application has divided Democrats in Minnesota and elsewhere. Progressives like U.S. representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison maintain it, while the state’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, and U.S. senator Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) are opposed.
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