The article doesn’t say, but, I’d bet that a few city council members have had crime and/or threats committed against themselves, their friends, their neighbors, their businesses, or their neighborhoods, and are suddenly Concerned
With violent crime on the rise in Mpls., City Council asks: Where are the police?
The meeting was slated as a Minneapolis City Council study session on police reform.
But for much of the two-hour meeting, council members told police Chief Medaria Arradondo that their constituents are seeing and hearing street racing which sometimes results in crashes, brazen daylight carjackings, robberies, assaults and shootings. And they asked Arradondo what the department is doing about it.
“Residents are asking, ‘Where are the police’?†said Jamal Osman, newly elected council member of Ward 6. He said he’s already been inundated with complaints from residents that calls for police aren’t being answered.
“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,†Osman said.
Just months after leading an effort that would have defunded the police department, City Council members at Tuesday’s work session pushed chief Medaria Arradondo to tell them how the department is responding to the violence.
Isn’t this the city that the council wanted with their defund push? And the meant “defund”, not reduce funding and numbers. What do they think would happen when they demonized every single police officer in Minneapolis? That they would be happy to be sh*t on by elected officials who are threatening their jobs? Let the city deploy all sorts of social workers or whatever they want to call the non-armed civilians they’ve been talking about. Let’s not forget how many have applied for retirement and/or simply resigned over the past months. It is expected at the MPD will lose 20% of its workforce. It won’t be easy replacing it.
Council President Lisa Bender, who was among those leading the call to overhaul the department, suggested that officers were being defiant. Her constituents say officers on the street have admitted that they’re purposely not arresting people who are committing crimes.
“This is not new,†Bender said. “But it is very concerning in the current context.â€
Nothing like insulting the officers you want to defund, eh?
Despite the uptick of crime in his ward, Cunningham, who supports the creation of a new community safety agency to replace the police department, said it’s particularly important now to start instituting some of those public health-based approaches to violence prevention. Recently, the council took more than $1 million from the police budget to hire “violence interrupters†to intervene and defuse potentially violent confrontations.
Well, good luck with that.
