Minneapolis City Council Members Want to End Police, Move Towards ‘Nonviolent Public Safety and Outreach’

A Minneapolis City Council member has been leading the charge to disband the city police force following the recent unrest in the city. Councilman Steve Fletcher says the entire council “to some degree” has been discussing disbanding the police department as an option.

In a multipart tweet, he wrote that “Several of us on the council are working on finding out what it would take to disband the Minneapolis Police Department and start fresh with a community-oriented, nonviolent public safety and outreach capacity.”

I don’t know yet, though several of us on the council are working on finding out, what it would take to disband the MPD and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity.

— Steve Fletcher – Minneapolis Ward 3 (@MplsWard3) June 2, 2020

Council Member Alondra Cano also called for the elimination of the police department, calling it “nonreformable” and said that “change is coming.”

The Mpls Police Department is not reformable.

Change is coming.#Justice4George

— Alondra Cano (@AloCanoMN) June 3, 2020

Fletcher appeared on CNN yesterday and said “The department is ungovernable. Chief (Medaria) Arradondo is a leader that we’ve all had very high hopes in and that I imagined could play a role in envisioning the next version of public safety. But he has clearly not been able to make the culture change happen that we were hoping for and investing in.”

In August of last year, Fletcher did an interview with a local news station after what they described as “a summer surge in violent crime.” Fletcher questioned at that time if the police department was the right place to invest the city’s resources.