> a jurisdiction that has decriminalized car theft
Is this a thing?
Is this a thing?
comes to mind, though I seem to recall similar other stories. Between the reactionary changes due to the public perception in the past few years, the defund movement undermining morale and other sundry causes, several major city departments are very understaffed and property crime investigation gets deprioritized pretty quickly.
Edit: removed the editorializing paragraph prior to the article. It was largely redundant.
The defund movement didn't spring from nowhere, it is a reaction to terrible policework. The police created the defund movement. Fix the police and it will go away.
They certainly need fixing, but I'm also not convinced that doing so will make the defund movement go away. Voices within what we are calling the "defund movement" range from "change how funds are allocated" to "abolish policing entirely".
Ilhan Omar, as an example, said “The Minneapolis Police Department is rotten to the root, and so when we dismantle it, we get rid of that cancer, and we allow for something beautiful to rise, and that reimagining allows us to figure out what public safety looks like for us.”
It isn't exactly a call for abolition, but it is saying get rid of them and we'll figure it out later. Her voice wasn't alone; the Minneapolis city council voted 12-0 to completely defund the department and replace the police with "peace officers" who presumably would have had different obligations in terms of interacting with people.
That ended up never going anywhere; a spike in violent and property crime led the necessary city charter amendment to fail (Minneapolis city charter currently mandates a minimum staffing level of police, which it hasn't been able to meet since 2020).
The political motivations behind this far end of the "defund" movement argue that policing simply cannot be successfully reformed - that there is no "fixing" the police.
Yeah, but your original statement is kind of a lie-by-omission. You're saying they're not able to hire because a bunch of people mistrust the police, as if the blame lays with those people for being mistrustful. But you're leaving out that they mistrust the police because of the police's own actions to earn that mistrust, repeated over decades.
> the Minneapolis city council voted 12-0 to completely defund the department and replace the police with "peace officers" who presumably would have had different obligations in terms of interacting with people
I live here and you're way wrong. Lisa Goodman would never have voted to "completely defund the police." In fact there was never a vote to "completely defund and replace [MPD]". As you said, they couldn't do that without changing the city charter. There was a long and bitter fight over that charter amendment, with the conservative wing of the council and the conservative mayor fighting and continuing to fight tooth & nail to shield MPD from all reform attempts. I can't think of any meaningful votes on this topic that went 12-0. I wonder what vote you are actually thinking of.
Where have you been? There was even a referendum on the matter proposed by the council as a direct result of their earlier vote that failed at the ballot on the issue, after the first version couldn't even get past the charter committee. I've seen a few different vote numbers- I think Lisa either didn't show for the vote, or it did end up at 12-1. She was pretty much alone in opposing the matter though; the vote to send the amendment to the charter was only 11-2 because someone wanted to be a little more moderate.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/06/12/minneapoli...
> https://minnesotareformer.com/briefs/minneapolis-city-counci...
As a side note, calling Mayor Frey a conservative is hilarious in the US. He is a Democrat and about as conservative as President Obama is. Frey didn't go along with defunding the police because the people who wanted the police defunded make up a minority and there was an election to win. "Having a funded police department" is something that clearly crossed political boundaries in terms of support.
https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/Download/File/3806/Transformi...
I found that link here: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/12/us/minneapolis-city-council-r...
The actual relevant bit is, "[Be it resolved that] the City Council [of Minneapolis] will commence a year long process of community engagement, research, and structural change to create a transformative new model for cultivating safety in our city." There is nothing in there about funding levels or even the structure or presence of the department. I don't think you can characterize that as a resolution "to completely defund and replace the police department."
> As a side note, calling Mayor Frey a conservative is hilarious in the US
Everything is relative. Within the politics of the city of Minneapolis, Frey's positions are pretty far on the conservative end of the spectrum, which is still to the left of national politics, yes. He opposes police reform, he vetoed full-time bus lanes over the recommendation of the designers, he opposes rent control, big business owners fund his campaigns, his biggest wins are in the richest areas of the city. He wins thanks to Republican voters, who don't otherwise have a feasible candidate to vote for here.
There was no one in the city who had any delusion that the "research" would produce anything but the amendment to the city charter. The only real surprise was that they had done such a terrible job at writing the amendment - it was very vague and hand-wavy.
The point remains- city councils and noisy activists constantly rallying for police to be defunded was and remains a factor in the increase in early retirements, transfers out, and difficulty recruiting new hires.