Wednesday, June 3, 2020
Veterans Call on the Minnesota National Guard to Stand Down
We are appalled to see military weapons, vehicles and equipment once again deployed in U.S. cities to control community members who are reacting to a long history of state-sanctioned violence.
June 1, 2020 Veterans for Peace VETERANS FOR PEACE
https://portside.org/2020-06-01/veterans-call-minnesota-national-guard-stand-down
Veterans For Peace calls for the immediate withdrawal of the Minnesota National Guard. We are appalled to see military weapons, vehicles and equipment once again deployed in U.S. cities to control community members who are reacting to a long history of state-sanctioned violence. When an already embattled community is subjected to militarized intimidation, by design, their environment becomes a war zone. We call on all those who are serving with the National Guard to refuse to serve violent and racist interests.
Veterans For Peace denounces the ongoing instances of police violence against Black bodies and people of color, this time resulting in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We also stand in opposition to the State of Minnesota’s and the Minneapolis police force’s militarized response to the right to protest.
Learning nothing from the now seemingly endless examples of ineffective attempts to silence protests with militarized violence—from Ferguson to Baltimore to New Orleans to Standing Rock—political figures continue to call on more military to quell the powerful resistance seen from the people in Minneapolis who demand justice. We continue to see the escalation of threats of violence from those in power--from Trump’s tweets threatening to shoot protestors to the governor’s decision to send in the national guard.
As Veterans For Peace, we know that increased militarization in our communities will never bring peace. We know that peace is only achieved with a strong commitment to justice. As veterans who served in various wars, we know there is a connection between increasing racist violence in the United States and the massive indiscriminate killing of hundreds of thousands of people in other lands. Growing racism against black, brown and Muslim people in the United States is a reflection of the racism that justifies killing non-white people abroad. The U.S. military deliberately uses racism to motivate young men and women to kill.
As veterans, we know what it’s like to be called to a “duty” that goes against our conscience. We urge all current National Guard members to lay down their weapons and refuse to fight against their neighbors and fellow community members. We urge you all to be fully informed as you make profound choices with possibly serious consequences. We urge any troops facing possible deployment to Minneapolis or already there to contact the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force at (619) 463-2369 and/or help@militarylawhelp.com for referral to a civilian attorney to discuss your options.
Our nation’s consistent option for militarization and the use of deadly force when it is not needed—at home and abroad—is exactly why we find ourselves in this situation. It makes no sense to think more violence and trauma heaped upon the Minneapolis community will quell the unrest. The Governor has moved beyond using a militarized police force to using the military. He is relying on intimidation and fear to end this. The only thing that will quiet this storm is justice.
Ways to take action:
Donate to organizations on the ground:
Minnesota Freedom Fund
Black Visions Collective
Reclaim the Block
Sign this Open Letter
Letter to Veterans to Recently Activated Minnesota Troops from About Face: Veterans Against the War
Let’s Imagine a Post-Pandemic Era With Less Policing and No New Jails
In this time of heightening crisis, we must be brave enough to use our full imaginations — and listen to those who have been dreaming of and fighting for just cities and communities for years.
June 1, 2020 Amanda Alexander TRUTHOUT
https://portside.org/2020-06-01/lets-imagine-post-pandemic-era-less-policing-and-no-new-jails
Right now, the “impossible” is happening every day.
In Detroit, with COVID-19 bursting the boundaries of our everyday catastrophes, we are seeing astounding — and overdue — changes in police and courtroom practices. Police are arresting fewer people and courts have scaled back to so-called “essential functions.” This comes after thousands of people in the community have long demanded an end to aggressive police stops, driver’s license suspensions and court debt. Now, courts have stopped issuing warrants for failing to appear and fewer people are being jailed. In some U.S. cities, jail populations are the lowest they’ve been since the 1980s — even the 1940s. Macomb County, near Detroit, just shelved plans for a new $300 million jail, citing the pandemic.
After years of unemployment, foreclosed homes, water shutoffs, shuttered schools, health clinic closures and jail expansion, many in Detroit’s Black majority have no illusions that our current system is doing anything but abandoning them to die. This calculated divestment has been relentless; after the outbreak of COVID-19, we learned that Wayne County officials had shifted $4 million in the 2019-2020 budget away from indigent health care and into new jail construction. And yet, in our neighborhoods, Detroit residents continue to prioritize each other. If we can do that here, despite decades of disinvestment, it’s possible everywhere. This moment has shown us that changes can happen quickly, and that the “impossible” is simply a matter of priorities. It’s about choosing — or being forced to choose — transformative solutions that dial into our collective humanity.
We are facing fundamental choices about who we are as a society. We could choose racist fear and fascist, dystopian policing. We could continue to deem entire communities “criminal” and refill the jails just as swiftly as we’ve begun to empty them. Or we could recognize we cannot return to “business as usual” because even before the pandemic, we had a state of emergency.
We’re at a turning point now. It’s time to learn from people who have been imagining new ways of being in community, and who have begun making monumental shifts.
At the Detroit Justice Center, we’ve asked more than a hundred young people what investments the city and county could make that would help them feel safe, valued and empowered. Not one of them has said we need more police on the streets or more jails. Instead, they said we should build mental health spas, restorative justice mediation centers, and invest in public transit. Pay our teachers, fix our schools, build housing that’s affordable and accessible for people with disabilities. These are not partisan political demands; in reality they are the freedom dreams of young people who understand that broad swaths of people have been living in a state of emergency for decades.Many communities have long known: jails produce poverty, job loss, evictions and homelessness, neighborhood instability, violence, trauma, debility and death.
In Detroit and much of the country, people who experience the brunt of systemic and interpersonal violence and the horrors of our jails and prisons have been fighting for renewed visions of safety and community well-being. They reject the idea that some people are only worthy of a jail or prison cell, and they have been leading the way in building more just cities. Their broader solutions encompass worker-owned cooperatives and thriving local farms and food systems, and they also recognize the need to empty jails in order to unlock the resources that we spend on criminalizing and punishing people.
We’ve entered a moment when we could bring the era of building new jails to an end. In the past several years, more research has shown what so many communities have long known: jails produce poverty, job loss, evictions and homelessness, neighborhood instability, violence, trauma, debility and death. Jails make communities less safe and less healthy. Where incarceration rates are high, community social and economic well-being decline. And all of this misery costs us over $1.2 trillion each year (once the impact on other systems like foster care, housing, and the costs to families is taken into account, that’s the total cost of incarceration in this country). Fortunately, organizers have given us ideas for what we could build instead, and models for fighting for budgets that would create more just and equitable communities.
Last year, in a historic vote, the Atlanta City Council moved to shut down the Atlanta City Detention Center and repurpose it as a hub where residents can access health care, housing, quality child care and more. The Center for Equity, Wellness and Freedom is the result of years of organizing and strategizing by formerly incarcerated women and their allies. Women on the Rise and the Racial Justice Action Center, led by Marilynn Winn and Xochitl Bervera, mobilized over 45 organizations to shut the jail under a rallying cry of “Communities Over Cages.” Atlanta officials built the jail in the lead-up to the 1996 Olympics “to hide the homeless from the community,” as Winn puts it, and filled it by ensnaring poor people in a cycle of tickets, warrants and unaffordable cash bail.
Over many years, the Atlanta activists fought to reduce pretrial incarceration, end cash bail, eliminate city ordinances that criminalize poverty, and cut city contracts with Immigrant and Customs Enforcement. And they didn’t stop there. As the jail population shrank from over 1,000 to less than 100, they began to articulate a vision for how the city could reallocate the $32.5 million it was spending each year on the jail to meet communities’ needs. After the city council vote, Atlanta’s Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms declared, “No longer will Atlanta be in the jail business.” Winn and others did what visionary organizers do so well — they’d made the unimaginable inevitable.Winn and others did what visionary organizers do so well — they’d made the unimaginable inevitable.
Thankfully, it’s been happening in cities all over the country. In New York City, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Seattle, Baton Rouge, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, people are demanding resources for health care and well-being. And they’re winning. In Philadelphia, organizers with the “Close the Creek” campaign won a fight to shutter the city’s House of Corrections after pretrial reforms drove down Philly’s jail population by a third, from 8,082 to 5,394, in two years (2016-2018). Last summer, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted to close the city’s Juvenile Hall and create rehabilitative noninstitutional support options for young people — after the Young Women’s Freedom Center and other organizers made them do it. This time last year, in Los Angeles County, after more than a decade of building power, the JusticeLA campaign blocked the construction of two new jails — projects totaling over $3.5 billion — and went on to win an unprecedented commitment to public health care. In Colorado, formerly incarcerated people and their allies, led by the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, have won millions in community reinvestment for housing, jobs, reentry supports and health care in communities hardest hit by violence and incarceration.
In this time of heightening crisis, we must be brave enough to use our full imaginations — and listen to those who have been dreaming of and fighting for just cities and communities for years. While these community builders and organizers do not have all the answers, they have been asking the right questions. Questions that have very high stakes for all of us, like how can we heal, so that we can create healthy communities? And how, through our heartbreak, can we be more open-hearted people, so that we can create cities that are more just?
This is transformative work that can orient us toward a livable future for us all. If we’re lucky, future generations will thank us for it.
THE GEORGE FLOYD KILLING IN MINNEAPOLIS EXPOSES THE FAILURES OF POLICE REFORM
Alice Speri, Alleen Brown, Mara Hvistendahl
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/george-floyd-minneapolis-police-reform/
AS PROTESTS OVER the police killing of George Floyd engulfed Minneapolis for a third night on Thursday, and solidarity protests broke out in cities across the country, there was both a sense that the country had been through this before — too many times — and that the stakes had begun to shift.
In the Twin Cities, where Floyd’s killing at the hands of officer Derek Chauvin was just the latest in a series of high-profile police killings in the last five years, those who took to the streets in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic were tired and exasperated. Years of misconduct and brutality by local police had brought many protests and much talk of reform. But Floyd’s death was an urgent reminder that here, as across the country, police reform had failed, and that the time had come for something different.
“They call for training, but are they doing the training, and is the training being internalized?” said Moriah Stephens, a special education teacher, as she stood near a highway overpass in St. Louis Park, the suburb where Floyd had lived, waving as passing cars honked in support. “I can tell you 50 times over that my life matters and I would like you to speak out about the fact that my life matters, and you can hear me say that 50 times, but are you going to do it?”
“I’m tired of being angry, and I’m tired of being tired, and I’m tired of seeing new hashtags,” she added, referring to a recent wave of police killings and other racist incidents across the country. “I’m lucky I’m alive. I can stand here. I can shout. There’s part of me that’s like, I need to use what I have — I have my life and I need to use it, but I’m also tired of doing that.”
Stephens, who had joined protests after the police killings of Philando Castile in a Minneapolis suburb in 2016, said her father was currently undergoing chemotherapy treatment. She was reluctant to go out in the middle of a Covid-19 outbreak that had already taken nearly 1,000 lives in Minnesota, and like many protesters was wearing a mask and standing at a distance from others. “I’m not supposed to be around people. But that’s where I’m at.”
In Floyd’s neighborhood, the signs people carried recalled protests following earlier police killings while also raising new demands. They said “I can’t breathe” — George Floyd’s last words as Chauvin kneeled on his neck for more than seven minutes, but also the last words of Eric Garner, who was killed six years ago by a New York police officer, igniting a movement against police violence of which Floyd’s death is just the latest chapter. After Garner’s death, as after the death of Michael Brown the same year in Ferguson, Missouri, and those of scores of other black men and women killed by police since then, protesters called for the officers to be held accountable. But there were new calls at Thursday’s protests — such as “Fund Community Not Police” — that tapped into a more recent and growing movement demanding not so much police reform and accountability as abolition, through the defunding of police departments.
“In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by MPD officer Derek Chauvin, and the Minneapolis Police Department’s escalated violence against the city’s grieving Black community, Minneapolis is in desperate need of visionary leadership,” the Minneapolis group Reclaim the Block wrote in a statement calling on the city council to defund the police department. “Now is the time to invest in a safe, liberated future for our city. We can’t afford to keep funding MPD’s attacks on Black lives.”
There were signs some local leaders were starting to see it the same way. Under pressure from students, the University of Minnesota announced this week that it would scale back its contract with the Minneapolis Police Department. The University of Minnesota was the first public institution to cut ties with MPD after the killing of George Floyd. On Friday afternoon, Minneapolis public schools board members issued a resolution to terminate the school district’s contract with the Minneapolis Police Department. And protesters called for more action to curtail the role of police altogether.
“The system is not broken. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do; that’s what people need to wrap their heads around,” said Imani Jackson, who grew up in St. Louis Park. “We need to create an entire new one.”
Reform Is Not the Answer
In the hours immediately after Floyd’s death, it was clear that the national conversation around police violence, set in motion by the killings of Brown and Garner in 2014, had finally begun to change. Chauvin, as well as three officers who had stood by without intervening as he killed Floyd, were promptly fired. Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, who took the helm of the department three years ago following backlash over another police killing, called for an FBI investigation. Mayor Jacob Frey called for the officers to be charged. On Friday, Chauvin was arrested and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter — a charge that means the officer had no intent to kill and left some protesters disappointed.
“People weren’t having it no more,” said Sam Martinez, an organizer with the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar. “The system knew that.”
A number of law enforcement and elected officials across the country also quickly denounced the Minneapolis officers’ actions — public criticism that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
In New York City, where Floyd’s death carried echoes of Eric Garner’s and where at least 72 protesters were arrested last night in a solidarity demonstration, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea and Mayor Bill de Blasio took to Twitter to condemn Floyd’s killing. “What we saw in Minnesota was deeply disturbing. It was wrong,” tweeted Shea. “This is not acceptable ANYWHERE.” “I am horrified,” tweeted de Blasio. “George Floyd was murdered in broad daylight and the man who killed him was a police officer.”
De Blasio’s and Shea’s comments stood in stark contrast with their defense of Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed Garner. Pantaleo was fired last summer, five years after Garner’s death.
“It took him five years to take any action in the Eric Garner case, and now he wants immediate action in Minneapolis,” said Alex Vitale, who runs the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, echoing widespread criticism of de Blasio’s statement.
Even the National Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police union in the country and a staunch defender of officers involved in killings of unarmed people in the past, released a statement criticizing the Minneapolis officers’ actions. “Based on the by-stander’s video from this incident, we witnessed a man in distress pleading for help,” the group wrote in a statement that was soon echoed by many local chapters of the union. “There is no doubt that this incident has diminished the trust and respect our communities have for the men and women of law enforcement.”
But critics warned that the public condemnations, including by law enforcement, were more a matter of political expediency than anything else. “I think that is politically convenient for all of them,” said Kandace Montgomery, director of Black Visions Collective, a Minnesota-based racial justice group, which is affiliated with Reclaim the Block and the Movement for Black Lives. “Until they actually offer real solutions and offer real policies that address the inherent violence of police departments, it’s all talk.”
“That’s all well and good, but it means nothing to me until they actually start making concrete changes in how they do business in their police department,” echoed Neill Franklin, a retired police major and the executive director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership. Franklin pointed to the long history of complaints of abuse and excessive force filed against the officers responsible for Floyd’s death — and to the fact that reports of police misconduct, nationwide, are kept from public view largely because of union contracts that protect officers no matter their conduct.
“There are police chiefs who are now voicing their disgust about what happened in Minneapolis. Well, how about you now move to make these personnel records public?” said Franklin. “If you really are concerned as a police leader in what’s happening, not just with Mr. Floyd, but case after case, rework the union contracts. … We need to change these laws so that we have the ability to take swift action.”
But while calling for greater transparency — including a national database tracking officers terminated for misconduct so they wouldn’t just move from department to department — Franklin acknowledged efforts to reform police had largely fallen short.
“Reform is not the answer, we’ve been trying it for decades, and as you can see, we’re just not getting anywhere,” he said. “We need a new paradigm of policing in the United States. It needs to be completely dismantled and reconstructed, not changing a policy here or there.”
“We are still working with a model of policing in this country that was born out of slavery in this country, that was born out of a white supremacy in this country,” he added. “That’s why reform won’t work and that’s why we haven’t made any traction whatsoever on this issue of race, as we’ve seen with the death of Mr. Floyd.”
In fact, the swift condemnation of the Minneapolis officers was largely a testament to the deep crisis policing has been facing for years. That crisis was only exacerbated by the current health and economic emergency, which has left communities reeling and feeling that their government, across institutions, has failed them in unprecedented ways.
“Police have realized that their basic legitimacy is being challenged here, and they had better figure out some way to get out from under this,” said Vitale, who wrote a book that has both anticipated and informed the growing national movement to defund police. “So if that means throwing a few individual officers under the bus, they are happy to do that.”
The reluctance of prosecutors to charge the officers responsible for Floyd’s killing was yet another sign of how little has changed. “There is other evidence that doesn’t support a criminal charge,” said County Attorney Mike Freeman, who compared Floyd’s death to that of Freddie Gray, who died in the custody of Baltimore police in 2015 — a rare case in which the officers involved were charged with murder 12 days after the incident. That prosecution was ultimately unsuccessful. “It was a rush to charge, it was a rush to justice,” Freeman said of Gray’s case, despite the fact that Floyd’s death, unlike Gray’s, was clearly caught on camera.
“When it’s the average citizen who gets arrested and charged for something, the arrest is made immediately as soon as you have probable cause for an arrest,” noted Franklin, the retired cop.
In Ferguson, the top prosecutor’s refusal to charge officer Darren Wilson in 2014 led to weeks of protests as a grand jury sifted through evidence in the case before declining to bring charges. In Minneapolis, it took three days of protests for Chauvin to be arrested and charged. Some protesters set several buildings on fire, including the Third Precinct headquarters, where Chauvin worked. And as they did after protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, police responded to protests of Floyd’s death with tear gas and rubber bullets, at one point spraying tear gas out of a moving vehicle onto an apparently peaceful crowd. Several protesters, as well as some journalists, were arrested. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz mobilized the National Guard, and after Chauvin was arrested, Frey set an 8 p.m. curfew for the weekend. President Donald Trump, as Barack Obama did after Freddie Gray’s killing in Baltimore, called protesters who looted stores “thugs” — though unlike Obama, Trump also called for them to be shot.
In fact, Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson ushered in an era of police reform that saw federal and local governments invest heavily in police training, including on racial bias, and in technology like body cameras that officials promised would bring about accountability. Floyd’s death was yet another reminder that those reforms have failed.
“This is happening after five years of being told, ‘Don’t worry, we’re getting the training,’” said Vitale. “The de-escalation training, the anti-bias training, the mindfulness training … why aren’t things getting any better?”
As evidence mounts of the failures of police reform, some departments and unions are beginning to embrace calls for individual accountability for “bad cops” who they continue to insist are not representatives of their institutions as a whole. But while protesters continue to call for individual officers to be arrested and prosecuted, there is a growing recognition that police misconduct will continue, no matter how many reforms politicians enact, as long as policing exists at the present scale.
“They are desperate. They see that they’ve got a major credibility problem and that there are active campaigns to take their money away,” said Vitale. “This whole idea of jailing killer cops as a way to fix policing is completely naive and misguided. Even when they are convicted, as rare as that is, there’s really no evidence that this feeds back into changes in how policing is done.”
Reducing the size of police departments by curbing their resources, he and others argue, will be far more effective at reducing police violence than any costly effort to improve the police. “These ‘defund and fund alternatives’ kinds of movement are much more threatening to police chiefs, which is why I think they are bending over backwards to try to get out ahead of this thing,” said Vitale. “People in the movement are shifting: They are not calling for body cameras and more training. More and more people are like, ‘Fuck that, take their money away.’”
The Conversation Has Changed
The movement against police brutality took off in Minnesota after police killed Jamar Clark in 2015. The 24-year-old black man was shot in the head by a pair of officers who said they had acted in self-defense, a story some witnesses disputed. In the wake of his death, community members shut down Interstate 94 and occupied the 4th Precinct in North Minneapolis for more than two weeks. Despite intensive organizing by groups like the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar, an internal investigation by the Minneapolis police department found that the two officers who killed Clark did not so much as violate a department policy.
Since then, local movements have pushed for justice for the families of victim after victim of police violence in Minnesota. Among those killed was Philando Castile, a 32-year-old black motorist pulled over by St. Anthony police in the suburb of Falcon Heights in 2016, whose girlfriend began livestreaming after an officer shot him as Castile reached for his wallet. In 2017, Justine Ruszczyk, also known as Justine Damond, a 40-year-old white woman, was approaching a Minneapolis police car to report a potential sexual assault when a startled police officer shot and killed her. And in 2018, body camera footage revealed Minneapolis police chasing Thurman Blevins, a 31-year-old black man who they said was carrying a gun, and shooting him to death. Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Castile, was acquitted, and prosecutors declined to file charges against the officers who killed Blevins. Mohamed Noor, who killed Ruszczyk, was sentenced to 12 years in prison — a sentence that some felt only came because Ruszczyk was white and Noor is black. Her family was awarded a record $20 million settlement.
At least a dozen police reform bills have failed to make meaningful progress in the state legislature since 2015. The most recent effort began last July, with the appointment of a task force that included police as well as anti-police-brutality organizers. After a series of public hearings, the group released a list of 28 proposals for reform in February, including creating a specialized unit in the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for investigating instances of deadly force. Then Covid-19 hit, and the follow-up actions required by the state legislature stalled.
On the heels of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson and of a series of other high-profile police killings, in 2014 Minneapolis became one of six cities to pilot the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice — a multimillion-dollar program that was the Obama administration’s response to the national call for police accountability. The initiative, widely replicated in police departments across the country, promoted a “community based” approach to policing in response to criticism of so-called broken windows policing and New York-style stop-and-frisk.
“The whole idea was that if police had implicit bias training, so more money for training police, and were using technology for more accountability, and that if police officers were more respectful when they’re interacting with the community, that that will promote a better idea of policing, and more cooperation with police,” said Nancy Heitzeg, a sociology professor at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, who has studied the initiative.
“That was the theory,” she said. “And what does it say about the limits of reform that the city of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis police department could be part of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar national project to enhance police community relations, and after all of that, here we are?”
After years of investment in improved policing with no results to show for it, “the conversation has changed,” she added. “There’s much more of a public awareness and conversation about abolition, and what that means and what that might look like. … I think people were radicalized by Jamar Clark and Philando Castile. And then they saw the contradictions around Justine Damond.”
Montgomery, the director of Black Visions Collective, said that organizers are tired of just calling for prosecutions. “We’re moving past a conversation around prosecuting the police and individual officers — that doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t prevent another Philando Castile or George Floyd,” said Montgomery. “To me and many of my comrades, police reform is irrelevant.”
Some demands have shifted to community control. Organizer Sam Martinez told The Intercept that the Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar wants a board similar to a city council or school board to run the police: controlling its budget, approving union contracts, and deciding disciplinary actions. Martinez says the board would have to be fundamentally different from previous civilian police review councils that law enforcement has mostly ignored.
For his part, Mayor Jacob Frey, who critiqued police during an election campaign that took place in the aftermath of Ruszczyk’s killing, increased the police budget last year by more than $8 million, part of an effort to put more officers on the street. He has called his brand of police reform “community-oriented” policing, where more officers would build stronger relationships with community members.
Meanwhile, the local police union has maintained powerful sway over the fate of the mayor’s tepid reform efforts. This summer, Frey banned police officers from participating in warrior-style trainings that promote an attitude that lethal threats to police are everywhere. Yanez, the officer who killed Castile, had participated in one such training. In response, Minneapolis police union head Bob Kroll, an avid Trump supporter, stated that the union would offer the training free to any officer who wanted it.
Montgomery argues that defunding police is the only meaningful way forward. “For too long we have invested a massive amount of money in an institution that continues to prove itself to be failing and to be inadequate to address the safety needs of our community,” said Montgomery. “Defunding is about allocating the abundance of resources we do have to things that have been proven to work” — like housing, health, and education.
On Friday morning, organizers with Reclaim the Block delivered a petition to Minneapolis city council members, demanding that they agree to never again increase the police funding, cut the current budget by $45 million to help manage Covid-19 shortfalls, invest in community-led health and safety strategies, and work to compel the police department to stop inflicting violence on community members. The elected officials were given a deadline of 8 a.m. Saturday to respond.
“My greatest hope is that our city council, our mayor, folks across the country take this opportunity to look at solutions that actually keep us safe and away from the police,” said Montgomery. “My fear is that we will settle for something that looks like justice but won’t change our future and won’t guarantee that we won’t have to be doing this in a couple of weeks or months or years.”
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