Minneapolis became the battleground for a national activist-driven debate about defunding police departments. The Democrats running the city are so beholden to those activists that the ensuing years in Minneapolis have been all about police reforms, and not about those surge in murders that the city has been unable to handle.
The Minneapolis City Council (made up of 12 Democrats and one official socialist) voted 12-0 in favor of a consent decree with the Department of Justice to oversee police reform in the city. Police reform has been the dominant narrative surrounding Minneapolis since police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in 2020.
Since the beginning, it hasn’t been clear exactly what magical “reform” was needed here: Chauvin had kneeled on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and ended up being convicted of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 22 years in state prison (and then, separately, 21 years in federal prison). You can’t exactly make what Chauvin did any more illegal than it already was.
Yet, the march toward these magical reforms continues on. According to local reporters Jay Kolls and Renée Cooper, based on previous consent decrees with other cities, “it could involve changes to the use of force or bias awareness training,” the latter being the racial pseudoscience that asserts that everyone is secretly racist and lets their secretly racist thoughts control their actions.
The most interesting part in all of this is that Minneapolis is enthusiastic about accommodating the Department of Justice’s plan to babysit the city and its police department, to the point that the city has gone along with the DOJ’s attempts to rush this agreement to a judge before Jan. 20. That is when Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president, putting such a deal in jeopardy. On top of that, Minneapolis also has a consent decree with the Minnesota state government, with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights having a four-year oversight agreement to monitor the Minneapolis Police Department.
This would make Minneapolis the first city to be bound to state and federal consent decrees. Democrat-run Minneapolis has signed away its police department to two different Democratic babysitters, which only happened because the city’s Democratic leaders were incapable of abolishing the department entirely. You may recall Minneapolis tried to replace its police department with a proposed “Department of Public Safety,” which voters voted down 56%-44%.
While Minneapolis Democrats continue to point to the police department as the villain in the city, homicides in Minneapolis have grown out of control. In 2019, before Floyd’s death and the city’s attempts to abolish its own police department, Minneapolis had 48 homicides. The city had spent the previous two decades hovering around 40-50 homicides every year, after spending the 1990s being referred to by the New York Times as “Murderapolis.”
That homicide number shot up to 84 in 2020 before rising to 93 in 2021, the deadliest year in Minneapolis since 1995 at the peak of “Murderapolis.” There were another 81 homicides in 2022 and 72 more in 2023. Headlines blared out that murders were declining in Minneapolis, which was technically true, though the number remained nearly twice as high as it did in 2019.
Even that small bit of good news no longer holds true. In 2024, as Minneapolis was focused on securing President Joe Biden’s Justice Department as a police department babysitter, homicides jumped back up to 76. Even as the national homicide rate has gone down, Minneapolis’s has gone back up, sitting at triple the homicide rate of the U.S. average per 100,000 people. Overall crime and violent crime are both up compared to pre-pandemic, pre-George Floyd levels.
Minneapolis has spent the last four years obsessing over eliminating its police department and implementing police reforms. Combatting historic levels of homicides is not very high on the agenda.
This has all led to another problem for which Minneapolis Democrats are responsible. The constant demonization of police by Black Lives Matter activists was embraced by Minneapolis Democrats who tried to eliminate the police department, and is perpetuated through the city’s babysitter consent agreements. So what happens when people who put their lives on the line every single day are constantly demonized by the city leaders who employ them (not to mention the national media and the state and federal government)?
The short answer is that they leave.
Minneapolis has lost 40% of its police force in the past four years. In October 2024, the Minnesota Star Tribune detailed the numbers: the city went from nearly 900 police officers in 2019 to 578. According to the department’s police chief, the city is short more than 200 officers. In 2024, Minneapolis hired 60 new sworn officers but lost 30, with the city once again coming short of its police staffing goals.
The police shortage and demoralization have another costly side effect. Before 2020, Minneapolis averaged about $7 million in overtime pay for police officers. In 2020, that number jumped to $11 million, and it has only continued to climb. In 2023, overtime pay cost Minneapolis $23 million. In 2024, the city was on pace for $26 million, $10 million over budget.
On a related note, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is proposing a budget increase of $13.7 million for the department. Coincidentally, $13 million is the number that is being budgeted for “constitutional policing” according to the consent agreement with the state government, and is $3 million more than needed to cover that ever-increasing overtime pay figure.
Frey and other Minneapolis Democrats sat idly by as scores of anti-police rioters burned down businesses and looted stores, leading to an estimated $55 million in damages. They threw their police officers to anti-police activists and even tried to eliminate their department in the process, and have now stuck it under liberal state and federal bureaucrats who don’t live in Minneapolis and have no vested interest in actually improving the city. It isn’t a surprise that Minneapolis has lost hundreds of police officers who don’t want to bother dealing with all of this; it’s a surprise that any new hires are coming on at all.
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The atmosphere of lawlessness that has been fostered in Minneapolis is worse and more pervasive than the (real or perceived) atmosphere that supposedly is to blame for Chauvin’s treatment of Floyd, which has been proven with the massive increase in homicides. Instead of focusing on how to empower more unelected bureaucrats who don’t have to live with the consequences of their decisions, Minneapolis could have been focused on addressing this crime surge and on defending the vast majority of its police officers who are not Chauvin.
Now, Minneapolis has too many police reform cooks in the kitchen, which would be a problem even if police reform promises weren’t so vague and noncommittal. Everyone is focused on forcing police to undergo “implicit bias” training or tinker with use-of-force directives, and no one is focused on the rise in murders or making sure there are police officers on the job to deal with them. Minneapolis Democrats have created Murderapolis 2.0, and all they are worried about is how many bureaucrats they can improve in police reform agreements.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
