For months, the 11 members of Ramsey County’s Appropriate Responses Initiative planned and trained around how to teach police officers, school principals and 911 operators to de-escalate tense situations, with the greater goal, when possible, of avoiding police response altogether.
If a fight breaks out between teens in a school setting, for instance, “it’s not necessary to call the cops for that,” said Nashauna Johnson-Lenoir, a member of the initiative’s steering committee and founding director of the Rochester, Minn.-based Journie Project, a youth mentoring effort.
Aiming to reduce police encounters with people of color, the steering committee expected the county would cement a $5.3 million grant to the St. Paul-based Roots Wellness Center for pairs of behavioral specialists to respond to non-emergency calls in St. Paul and Roseville. The committee learned in January that a county staffer overseeing the initiative had been reassigned, and the contract never was signed.
“All of a sudden … there’s no contract with Roots Wellness,” Johnson-Lenoir said. “Nobody ever talked to us about what happened.”
Johnson-Lenoir and other members eventually sat down with Ramsey County Manager Ling Becker, who she said informed them the county had “no capacity” for a large-scale urban initiative, and that the St. Paul Police Department and mayor’s office had shown little interest.
A smaller, $600,000 county effort would expand an existing program in the suburbs, the committee was told. St. Paul Police Chief Axel Henry said Wednesday that he was not familiar with the Roots Wellness Center and had not weighed in on any initiatives involving the center.
“We have yet to launch it, as the county pulled it from us the week we were supposed to sign the contract, after months of negotiations and resources invested,” said Katy Armendariz, founder of the Roots Wellness Center. “We are supposed to be launching in Maplewood very soon and we have a meeting with Ramsey County coming up in June. We haven’t signed anything.”
Policing after George Floyd
Since the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, efforts to establish alternatives to traditional police response to both emergency and non-emergency calls have gained public attention, and in some cases public funding and rhetorical leverage.
The reality on the ground, however, has been more nuanced, with some initiatives quietly falling by the wayside, rejected by voters and municipal leaders or landing under explicit attack by the Trump administration. Police unions often have been resistant.
“Conceptually, a lot of these things sound really good, and they look good on paper, and when it comes to real-world application, it just doesn’t work,” said Mark Ross, president of the St. Paul Police Federation. “What some person thinks is an innocuous, low-level call could turn into a schizophrenic person with a weapon, and for the most part, social workers aren’t in the best position to handle that. Generally speaking, routine calls can go sideways really quickly.”
The wide-ranging strategies, sometimes lumped together under the umbrella of “Defund the Police,” have varied in their goals and outlook from the start. Some adherents have called for simply trimming police budgets and reallocating those resources to community-based violence prevention and alternative response efforts, some of which work hand-in-hand with police or are embedded inside departments.
Other groups, like the Minneapolis organization MPD150, have called for building a “police-free future” and wholeheartedly embraced the mission of replacing certain police departments, or even eliminating police and prisons altogether. Perhaps tellingly, MPD150 sunset itself around December 2022.
A common thread has aimed for reforming other aspects of police response, such as banning chokeholds and instituting greater scrutiny of police use-of-force.
For the movement, gains in each of those areas has been “decidedly mixed,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, who pointed to strategic missteps among organizers, entrenched racism and the doubtful durability of some attempted reforms. “Overall, Black Lives Matter aspirations fell short.”
‘We need to actually commit’
A recent “Safe and Thriving Communities” report from New York University’s School of Law found that Minneapolis has indeed diverted 9% of 911 calls to non-police responders, including traffic control, animal control, behavioral specialists and the city’s 311 information line, as well as online reporting.
“Those are good metrics,” said Yohuru Williams, a history professor and director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas. “If you could grow that over time, you’d be talking about a really novel way of getting the help out to people that need it. … There’s still in some quarters a deep investment in these type of alternative interventions.”
Still, more ambitious reforms have stumbled out of the gate. On the campaign trail for re-election in 2021, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey claimed he had banned no-knock police warrants. Just a few months later, 22-year-old Amir Locke was shot dead by a Minneapolis SWAT officer executing a no-knock warrant.
“Some of these changes do get implemented, but they don’t get the long-term support and funding they need to actually succeed, with metrics for accountability,” said Greg Sullo, a spokesman for the progressive advocacy organization Minneapolis for the Many.
“I don’t think the moment has passed,” Sullo added. “People are still looking for comprehensive changes. … We need to actually commit to making those changes, not just temporary fixes here and there.”
Meanwhile, instead of being defunded, police budgets generally have grown with time, and police contracts severed in the wake of officer-involved shootings have been reinstated.
Within three days of Floyd’s death, the University of Minnesota dropped its contracts with the Minneapolis Police Department for support and specialty services such as canine explosive detection and security at football games. Two years later, amid rising crime near campus, the university made an about-face and began rolling out fresh contracts with MPD.
Following the police shooting death of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights in July 2016, the city of Falcon Heights severed its ties with the St. Anthony Police Department, which had handled its policing. In March, Falcon Heights came full circle and reinstated its contract with St. Anthony PD, which at first came as a surprise to members of Castile’s family.
Clarence Castile, Philando’s uncle, said he was later reassured to learn that most of the original staff and officers of the St. Anthony PD had turned over since his nephew’s death, including the police chief, and that officers now were assigned body cameras. He prays the culture of the department has evolved, as well.
“We all know we can’t have a city without guardians and warriors, people to protect the innocent and lock up the evil,” said Clarence Castile, who served for a time as a community service officer. “It has to be a special group of people who have training. You can’t just have citizens doing the work without training for how to handle stressful situations.”
“All that ‘Defund (the Police)’ stuff, I didn’t think it was a great idea,” added Castile, the board chair of Lights On!, a nonprofit that works closely with police departments to offer drivers repair vouchers instead of tickets if they’re pulled over for broken taillights. “It’s a good idea to redirect some money and put the community in charge of some things, but never 100% on the community to protect and serve.”
Progressives undermined by soaring crime rates
The St. Paul Police Department once drew praise in some corners for embedding social workers and behavioral health specialists in a police mental health unit dedicated to following up on mental health calls. The Community Outreach and Stabilization Unit (COAST) launched in 2018 but ended last year as the city transitioned instead to “Familiar Faces,” which seeks to provide support services to the few dozen people who draw the most repeat attention from the city’s emergency services.
St. Paul, Minneapolis and Ramsey County continue to fund non-police efforts to get upstream of crime, such as nonprofit street outreach groups devoted to violence intervention, like A Mother’s Love and MAD DADS in Minneapolis. Some alternative intervention programs have been marred by scandal, including a recent shootout in Minneapolis involving two members of an anti-violence organization.
In Minneapolis, “those policies either didn’t work, or weren’t implemented in a way that would be persuasive to policymakers,” said Jacobs, who foresees many such efforts soon petering out. “We’re seeing the city of Minneapolis pulling back. Some of the responses at the state level are not just from Republicans, but from DFLers saying, ‘Wait a second, what are we really getting for all this money?’”
After Floyd’s death, more ambitious efforts to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department gained limited traction. In 2021, Minneapolis voters rejected a ballot measure — 56% to 44% — that would have replaced the MPD with a new public safety department. The prospect ran into political pushback from members of the city council, some of whom initially embraced and later abandoned the “Defund” rhetoric over time, as well as Frey, who was handily re-elected that same year with 49% of the vote in a 19-way race.
A major backdrop to that election involved soaring crime rates. The Minneapolis homicide rate in 2021 was triple what it was in 2011 as the city came one killing shy of breaking its 1995 all-time record of 97 homicides. To many voters, “defunding” the police sounded a lot like eliminating police entirely.
“It was a huge misstep, even by those who sought to explain what ‘Defund the Police’ meant,” said Williams, noting the prospect of trimming police budgets and using the savings for alternative response or social spending got lost in translation. “It did create an impression of a society without police, and communities of color — specifically the Black community in Minneapolis — rejected that. The community wanted good public safety. ‘Defund’ became kind of a slogan and a stand-in for what community was asking for.”
Similar stories have played out across the country. Nationally, urban crime rates — including murders and carjackings — spiked heavily during the pandemic, though they’ve since fallen back toward pre-pandemic levels. Voters remain unforgiving. In 2022, Oakland, Calif.-area residents elected Pamela Price as Alameda County District Attorney based in part on her pledge to prosecute the police, only to recall her from office last November, after less than two years, amid concerns she was too soft on high-profile crimes.
In November, progressive district attorneys lost their re-election bids to self-proclaimed “tough on crime” Republican challengers in Los Angeles and Tampa, Fla.
Not every reformer has had such a tough go of it, Sullo noted. In Philadelphia, citing declining homicide numbers and his efforts around criminal justice reform, progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner won the Democratic primary on Tuesday in a race with no Republican challenger, all but securing his re-election to a third term in office.
Minneapolis consent decree under fire
That’s not to say that other types of police reform haven’t gained ground. In January, Frey and the Minneapolis City Council approved the terms of a federal consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice, building on a DOJ investigation launched in April 2021, the day after a jury found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering Floyd.
The federal investigation found that the Minneapolis Police Department racially discriminated against Black and Native people for years using “unjustified deadly force and excessive less-lethal force,” and that the department had cultivated a policing culture that enabled Chauvin to perpetrate deadly violence against Floyd.
That court-enforceable consent decree — which calls for an independent monitor, changes to police supervision requirements, training and other reforms — and another in Louisville, Ky., now are under fire by the Trump administration, which wants both dismissed. Frey has said he’ll move forward with enforcing the reform mandates anyway, with or without help from the federal government.
For some Black leaders, that’s not particularly reassuring. “It feels like a ‘here we go again’ moment,” Williams said. “If we could have done it ourselves, we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.”
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