In what is being called a “Safety for All” plan, the Minneapolis City Council has cut the Police Department budget by $8 million. The budget was passed Thursday despite soaring violence plaguing the city. Ironically, the city claims it has plans to continue to hire more officers in the upcoming years.
Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender jubilantly took to Twitter to make the announcement: “The City Council adopted a 2021 budget!! All the #SafetyForAllBudget proposals passed for 2021. Mental health, violence prevention, oversight and more.”
National Review reports the city’s “budget cuts follow a summer of surging crime and widespread rioting over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody in May.” Statistics are heartbreaking; “more than 500 people have been shot in the city this year, according to police data, twice as many as 2019.” Also, “murders have spiked more than 50 percent, while the city has seen nearly 5,000 violent crimes, the highest level in five years.”
Nonetheless, the appeasing liberal leadership is “shifting” $8 million from the Police Department to other areas such as mental health and violence prevention programs “after its stalled attempt earlier this year to dismantle the Police Department and replace it with unarmed professionals that would instead respond to mental health calls, domestic disputes and other situations that normally involve police.”
Despite the council’s self-congratulations, they weren’t able to accomplish all their goals. When it came to police staffing, the council had to change its position “late Wednesday after Mayor Jacob Frey, who had hoped to keep the current target level of 888 officers, said he was considering vetoing the budget over concern about ‘the massive permanent cut to officer capacity in future years.”
Initially, the council proposed dropping the force’s authorized size to 750 officers beginning in 2022. Mayor Frey released a statement Thursday saying, “my colleagues were right to leave the targeted staffing level unchanged from 888 and continue moving forward with our shared priorities…the additional funding for new public safety solutions will also allow the City to continue upscaling important mental health, non-police response, and social service components in our emergency response system.”
