2021 Minneapolis Question 2
The police abolition movement gained momentum in the U.S. city of Minneapolis during protests of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and culminated in the failed Question 2 ballot measure in 2021 to replace the city's police department with a public safety department. The measure would have removed minimum staffing levels for sworn officers, renamed the Minneapolis Police Department as the Minneapolis Department of Public Safety, and shifted oversight of the new agency from the mayor's office to the city council. It required the support of 51 percent of voters in order to pass. In the Minneapolis municipal election held on November 2, 2021, the measure failed with 43.8 percent voting for it and 56.2 percent voting against it.
The ballot measure was part of the political movement in the aftermath of Floyd's murder by local political activists that sought to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with another system of public safety and divert its budget towards social services programs in the city, such as affordable housing, violence prevention, education, and food security. A public pledge by nine of the 13 elected members of the Minneapolis City Council on June 7, 2020, to "defund police" garnered significant attention for the police abolition movement, as well as considerable political backlash. The goals of the "defund police" pledge were never fully defined by city council members at the time of the pledge and the effort largely collapsed in the following months. A majority of Minneapolis city residents, including a large number of persons from the Black community, opposed a reduction in the size of the city's police force.
Public discussion in late 2020 about changing the city's policing policies came during a surge in violent crime, which disproportionately affected people of color in the city. At the end of 2020, city council shifted 4.5 percent of the city's annual police budget to violence prevention programs, but the incremental move fell well short of the sweeping changes demanded by activists and pledged by local lawmakers earlier in the year. Though the city council committed to maintaining the same number of police officer positions, attrition and disability claims left the department with 200 fewer police officers, and city residents grew frustrated by the lack of a police presence and slower response times to 911 calls.
After the failed vote, public attention shifted away from ambitious police reform measures and towards crime reduction and more incremental reform strategies.
Background
Police abolition movement
Across the United States, community groups advocated for reducing government budgets and “public safety” spending on police and prisons and reallocating funding towards services like housing, employment, community health, and education. In Minneapolis, the local advocacy group MPD150 published a report in 2017 recommending the Minneapolis Police Department be abolished, argued that "the people who respond to crises in our community should be the people who are best-equipped to deal with those crises" and that first responders should be social workers and mental health providers.George Floyd protests
Following the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin and the resulting civil unrest, Minneapolis Public Schools, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, multiple private businesses and venues, and the University of Minnesota severed ties with the Minneapolis Police Department. Civil leaders in Minneapolis and elsewhere began calling for reforms of the city's police force, including the defunding, downsizing, or abolishing of departments. During heavy rioting in Minneapolis the night of May 28, 2020, demonstrators set the third police precinct station ablaze as police forces retreated from the area of East Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenue.Timeline
2020
March to Mayor Frey's home
On June 6, 2020, thousands of protesters marched in Minneapolis in an event led by local organization Black Visions Collective. Protesters gathered at the city's Bottineau Field Park, marched past the Minneapolis Police Federation's union headquarters, and ended at Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey's private home. The march featured chants of "George Floyd!" and "Black Lives Matter!" and pleas to defund the police.At Frey's home, the crowd demanded that he come outside, and then when Frey appeared asked if he supported abolishing the city's police force. After Frey responded that he did not, the crowd ordered him to leave and booed him away. At the rally, United States Representative Ilhan Omar, whose Minnesota's 5th congressional district encompassed Minneapolis, denounced the city's police force as "inherently beyond reform".
Powderhorn Park rally
On June 7, 2020, at a Powderhorn Park rally organized by Black Visions Collective and several other black-led social justice organizations, nine of the 13 members of the Minneapolis City Council vowed before a large crowd to dismantle the city's police department.Onstage taking the pledge were Council President Lisa Bender, Vice President Andrea Jenkins and Council Members Alondra Cano, Phillipe Cunningham, Jeremiah Ellison, Steve Fletcher, Cam Gordon, Andrew Johnson, and Jeremy Schroeder. At the rally, Bender said of the pledge to abolish the city's police force, "Our efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period." Council Member Linea Palmisano attended the rally as an audience member, but did not go on stage or take the pledge, and Council Members Lisa Goodman and Kevin Reich did not attend nor agree to the pledge.
The June 7 pledge by nine city council members, though it represented a veto-proof majority, did not actually disband the Minneapolis police force and details about the next steps in the process were not defined at the time. Some activists wanted to consider the idea of unarmed crisis response personnel and re-purposing the police department's $193 million annual budget for education, food, housing, and health care.