In 2022, following attempts by the city council to disband the Minneapolis Police Department, Mayor Frey led an effort to create the Office of Community Safety (OCS) to coordinate the city’s five departments overseeing public safety – Police, Fire, Emergency Management, Emergency Communications, and Neighborhood Safety.
As designed the commissioner of OCS reports directly to the mayor – an aspect that the city council has never embraced. So, the council has repeatedly undermined OCS and its efforts in order to undermine the mayor.
This week the city council voted to eliminate OCS through the creation of a city ordinance that reorganized the city government structure. The vote was 9-4 which is considered veto proof.
The arguments made by councilmembers who voted to eliminate OCS centered on the failure of OCS to provide results commensurate with its costs – $2.1 million dollars. Two of the top examples provided were the police department’s overtime costs and the lack of oversight and accountability with the violence interrupter program run out of the Department of Neighborhood Safety.
I find myself in the unique position of agreeing with the council’s decision but remain highly skeptical of the council’s true intentions. It appears more likely that the council is setting up the mayor for failure, by eliminating the administrative resources the mayor relies upon to carry out many of the signature “reforms” the mayor and council have both committed to – police reform as dictated through consent decree and managing alternatives to policing such as the violence interrupter program. Take those unnecessary reforms off the plate, and the need for OCS disappears.
I have never believed Minneapolis would benefit from the creation of a new bureaucracy – and wrote about that belief during the debate over the creation of OCS. What Minneapolis needs is a government that values its police department and invests in and stands behind that department. Minneapolis has done the opposite since 2020. Consequently, city residents and all Minnesotans have paid a heavy price for the resulting dysfunction.
Should the elimination of the OCS stand, it represents an opportunity for the city to reset its public safety strategy.
First, the city needs to end its obsession with the police related consent decree with the state, and the self-imposed fulfillment of the terms of a now defunct federal consent decree. The quicker the city disposes of those sandbags the quicker the police department can focus its energy on staffing, training, and operations. A properly staffed and trained police department would not require exorbitant overtime funds to operate, nor would it struggle to properly manage its workforce – two chief complaints waged by the council.
Second, the city needs to run public safety initiatives through its police department, not a menagerie of “alternatives to policing” which have undermined legitimacy in the police while doing little if anything to improve public safety.
The functions of violence interrupters, victim services, and other aspects of the Department of Neighborhood Safety are all functions of a well-staffed and supported police department. So too is police recruitment, retention, and training. Give the police department the resources to manage these functions properly and then get out of the way and let them do their job.
Sadly, this reset is unlikely to happen. Instead, it’s more likely the council and mayor will continue to fight, and the city will continue to create its own impediments to achieving actual public safety.