No, Minneapolis Has Not ‘Defunded the Police’

A tweet and headline from the New York Post oversimplify the actions that the Minneapolis City Council has taken.

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In response to this fact check, the New York Post has updated its headline and social media posts where possible to contain more accurate language.

A viral tweet from the New York Post claims that the Minneapolis City Council is “alarmed by crime surge after defunding police.” The tweet links to an article with a headline that says the same, and which went viral on Facebook. 

In June, the council infamously voted to dismantle the police department. The vote, however, was just the first step in the process of actually doing so: The Minneapolis charter requires a police department and the city council cannot unilaterally alter the city charter. There are two ways the city charter can be amended. One avenue is amendment by ordinance, which requires the council to unanimously approve a proposal. In such a case, the proposal would then advance for review by the Minneapolis Charter Commission, a state agency that oversees the city’s charter. The commission has the authority to alter the proposal before sending it back to the council, and even still the mayor would have to approve of the proposal as well. 

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has stated he does not support abolishing the police department, so the city council’s proposal sought to amend the city charter through a second method: putting it on the ballot. This course of action requires either mayoral approval or a veto-proof majority on the city council (which the advocates for defunding have), but still requires review by the Minneapolis Charter Commission. In August, the commission voted to take an extra 90 days to review the proposal, meaning the proposal will miss the deadline to appear on the ballot in November. In the meantime, the city’s charter remains the same.

The secondary claim of the article and its headline, that crime has increased in Minneapolis this year, is accurate: Data from the Minneapolis Police Department show 552 violent crimes in the past 30 days, compared to 466 during the same period in 2019. Year-to-date totals for violent crimes in 2020 are higher than at the same point in 2019 (3,773 to 3,176 respectively).

The article was originally published by Fox News, and the body of the article contains more nuance than the Post headline, noting that the city council “took several steps toward dismantling the city’s police department.” The article’s title on Fox News also reads: “Minneapolis City Council alarmed by surge in crime months after voting to defund the police.” However, the article does not provide details about the charter-amendment process, and “defund” has become such an ambiguous term that, especially with the New York Post headline, many social media users were left confused or with an incorrect impression about the current status of the police department.

The police department in Minneapolis still exists, and will continue to do so unless the Minneapolis Charter Commission and voting public of Minneapolis approve the city council’s proposal. 

If you have a claim you would like to see us fact check, please send us an email at factcheck@thedispatch.com. If you would like to suggest a correction to this piece or any other Dispatch article, please email corrections@thedispatch.com.

Photograph by Ira L. Black/Corbis/Getty Images.

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  6. Wayne

    So, I get the hurdles a city in Minnesota must overcome to eliminate it's police department. I wish you had taken up the option of reducing their budget to $100, just enough to support a phone service that directed 911 calls to the the state highway patrol and or the department of family services. Could the city council do that?

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      JR

      The city charter requires that the have a certain ratio between police employees and residents, though I suppose a change to the charter would deal with that — and could be accompanied by a call for a $100 budget.

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    Dr. Livesey

    Alec, I'd like to commend you for your commendable restraint in this article. It's very professional, in the same way that an emergency room doctor shows professional restraint when pulling out an unlikely object some poor fool had imprudently inserted into his rectum. No guffawing, no giggling, no sniggering, not even a smile that the patient could detect. Just get the rectum rectified and have a comforting bedside manner for the patient.

    The idea of defunding a police department is just as insane and hilariously, gloriously stupid as the patient's folly, but it had nothing to do with the actual purpose of the article, so, like any real professional, you didn't succumb to the normal human reaction. You rose above it: "Just the fact check, Ma'am. Just the fact check ..." So I salute you, Alec: You are smart, but (and I'm sure I'm not the first to say this) you are no smart alec.

    (At least not in the article, where it counts.)

    I do pity the emergency room doc when the Minneapolis council members come in to get their heads similarly extricated.

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      Mudskipper

      It is unclear to me what the Minneapolis council members are up to. They plan to disband the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with another department charged with public safety that would presumably have police officers in it. I think there is a lot of local politics going on and a power struggle over who controls the police department. It's difficult to tell from a distance exactly what is going on. However, I don't think the plan is to get rid of policing altogether.

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        Idontdocute

        My question is if they defund the police department and initiate funding to a policing agency, a traffic policing agency, a mental health response team and supporting agency, and maybe up the money to animal control, are they really just getting out of the contract with the police union?

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      Evan Donovan

      Yes, it is a point worth making that crime in Minneapolis requires policing - but to exaggerate the headline to make it seem like the police don't exist at all, actually weakened the Post's argument.

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    BrandonAlleman

    Has anyone defunded police yet? It seems a lot of people are correlating a thing that hasn’t happened yet to rising crimes stats in the past few months including Ryan Streeter in his disappointing piece posted September 14 on the Dispatch.

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    1. JohnO

      Removed all funding for the police in favor of a 'new model for public safety'? no that's empty talk practically even if eg. some members of the Minneapolis City Council actually believed they could do that. And, some real cuts in funding have been overstated by local authorities advertising them as a response to the perceived problem of police behavior. For example in NY it was agreed to reduce funding $1bil (out of something like $10 'operating' plus 'central expense') but the real cut is less per various detailed analyses.

      But, in an ideal world if local politicians stand with people heaping abuse on the police and police officers in questionable incidents are arguably overcharged by prosecutors for political reasons, that should have no effect on police performance. Ideally the police are professionals who ignore insults, and ideally there would always be a clear line between proper police conduct and misconduct, just can just stay on the right side of it and have no worries. As well, ideally there would be no such thing as aggressive police action which sometimes leaves non-criminals unhappy but still reduces crime. Ideally the lowest level of crime would be achieved where nobody was ever unhappy with the police but criminals.

      But the real world does not work that way to a possibly serious extent as to crime rate. I suspect a relatively major reason for the surge in crime is the police reducing their efforts, sometimes for reasons one would be hard pressed to blame them for if honestly putting oneself in their shoes, sometimes for reasons which are not justified. But still I think that's a major issue in the crime surge.

      Similarly there really is a such thing as a criminal element, and its 'morale' and confidence in getting away with crimes can vary depending on both police attitudes and the general social climate. Again putting oneself in their shoes it's reasonable to infer more confidence now in many places that the backlash against police excesses is providing cover to get away with crimes for the large % of serious crimes committed by people pretty firmly embedded in the criminal life (maybe because of societal inequities at root, but not usually people who were working an honest job all along but got laid off).

      Saying the crime rise is a function of economic distress could have some element of truth too, but the historical correlation is pretty weak. It didn't generally pan out in the quite severe recession and very slow recovery after 2009.

      Again taking NY as example, before the recent increase various categories of serious crime declined up to 90% in NY v peaks in the 1990's, more than almost anywhere else in the US. But aside from political sloganeering, I don't think anybody can quantify the components of that change exactly. It likely had a large element of virtuous circle where the original impetus might have been relatively subtle. Now it may have shifted back to vicious circle unfortunately, though I hope not.

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      Evan Donovan

      It depends on what you mean by "defunded". Some cities have actually cut funding to police. And crime has gone up in various cities this summer year-over-year. But there are many possible reasons for that.

      The Wall Street Journal had a great article that went in depth on the possible reasons.

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        BrandonAlleman

        DTP is a 100 day old slogan and not a policy as far as I'm concerned. I'm just looking for those who promote it and those who criticise it to specify the policy that they are discussing. I'll check out the WSJ article!

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    3. William Griese

      The police have been defunded, just look outside, our communities are on fire! They are looting and burning! It's Antifa! Antifa is training wild animals to kill hikers, while Hillary dines on the blood of young children! It's a catastrophe! Only Trump can save us from the horror of the last four years!

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      1. Young Old Man

        Trying too hard.

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        rlritt

        No one has defunded the police. Yes there riots in some cities. In my opinion, I believe it is a result of the past six months uncertainity, job loss, lack of other things that would normally occupy people. Its not a lie that "idle hands (minds) are the devils worksop.

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    Victor Clairmont

    Ok so, trying to de-fund but now making it a voter referendum would be more correct? And they started the process but evidently are facing harsh push back. Crime surging is bad of course. Police do feel under fire nationwide rightly or wrongly.

    Details details! I'm all about details~~

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      Evan Donovan

      I don't think the fact check here is defending the idea of making it a voter referendum; this isn't an editorial. It's just saying that MCC's action was essentially performative - and probably why they did it, I would think. It allows them to have it both ways by looking like they are abolishing the police while actually knowing it will probably never happen.

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