Minneapolis City Council looking into disbanding police department

> We can totally reimagine what public safety means, what skills we’re recruiting for, what tools we do and don’t need. We can invest in cultural competency and mental health training, de-escalation and conflict resolution.

I applaud this approach. As a nation of concerned and affected states and cities, we owe it to ourselves to embark on new experiments, designed from the start to fit the current environment.

You want a public safety concern that is geared toward a desired outcome? Design it and refine it. We cannot bring forward a carbon copy of the past and expect to transcend its worst parts at the same time.

> We can resolve confusion over a $20 grocery transaction without drawing a weapon, or pulling out handcuffs.

> The whole world is watching, and we can declare policing as we know it a thing of the past, and create a compassionate, non-violent future. It will be hard. But so is managing a dysfunctional relationship with an unaccountable armed force in our city.

This is so on point. From what I have read so far, it also syncs with relevant and current research into policing.

Note that this worked quite well for Camden, NJ: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to-crim...

It’s not calling for no police, just starting from scratch imagining what a police force could be. In the Camden case most of the officers were re-hired.

This is really interesting, it is the important parts about local government we don't usually see (RIP real local news). It would be a really good experiment to try other ways of policing. Police have a lot of levers to push government Discussed in the thread, and other things like union bloc voting, etc. Balancing power in government would produce better outcomes for everyone.

Yeah, that won't work.

Something has to change, but any solution is still going to need cops. It's not realistic to think otherwise.