Minneapolis City Councilor Steve Fletcher wants to disband the entire police department

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Snattlerake

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Minneapolis City Ward Three Councilor Steve Fletcher made the revelation in a series of tweets on Tuesday.

Minneapolis, MN – Members of the Minneapolis City Council are looking into how to go about disbanding Minneapolis Police Department (MPD), according to one of the city’s council members.

Fletcher said that it has become clear that “people in the streets” have proven that a “permanent, generational change to the mainstream view of policing” is imminent.


During an interview on Wednesday, Fletcher said that the MPD is “ungovernable” and that MPD Chief Medaria Arradondo has failed to “make the culture change happen that we were hoping for an investing in,” KSTU reported.

He tweeted that he and “several” of his fellow city council members “are working on finding out what it would take to disband the MPD.”

Fletcher said they would like to replace the city’s police force by starting “fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach” model.

“Our city needs a public safety capacity that doesn’t fear our residents. That doesn’t need a gun at a community meeting. That considers itself part of our community. That doesn’t resort quickly to pepper spray when people are understandably angry. That doesn’t murder black men,” Fletcher wrote.

Fletcher said that the city must “totally reimagine what public safety means,” right down to what skills they are recruiting for.

“We can invest in cultural competency and mental health training, de-escalation and conflict resolution,” he suggested. “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,” he lamented.
 

Snattlerake

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Let them have the city. I want to see how the touchy feely police department will work.

I can see it now, a black male robs a liquor store. The report says a person non gendered, no race, took some money they were entitled to from the Ajax Liquor Store.
 

SoonerP226

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I don't know jack about the Minneapolis PD, but sometimes the answer actually is that you have to burn an organization to the ground and rebuild it from scratch. That's what happened in Noble; for years, their PD was notorious, kind of like the Valleybrook PD without the mean streak. When one of their officers shot at a snake in a tree and accidentally killed a young boy, that was the straw that broke the camel's back, and it resulted in Noble disbanding their PD for a few years, with the Cleveland County Sheriff's office providing law enforcement. Noble eventually hired an actual professional LEO to be the chief, and he has, by all accounts, rebuilt it into a credible agency.

Like I said, I don't know jack about the Minneapolis PD, so I don't know if there are any parallels there, but disbanding and rebuilding it might be as crazy as y'all seem to think. Somehow I doubt it, but it's not completely beyond the realm of possibility.
 

ZGXtreme

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I actually hope they do it simply for the social experiment aspect of it and the opportunity to point and say “we told you so”.

If our level of law enforcement were higher I’d actually say that yes, more smaller PDs need to be disbanded and contracted with the Sheriff’s office much like in California. Unfortunately with our Sheriff’s offices that by and large wouldn’t exactly be much of a change.

As much as California sucks due to their politics, I’ve learned over the last few years as I established professional contacts out there that CA POST has those agencies locked on training wise and even in an interoperability way.

Here, CLEET is a clown college and if something truly broke bad you’d be hard pressed to be able to integrate agency personnel among each other without significant issues. That part does need to be addressed.
 

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