Is Minneapolis a ‘Secret Bellwether’ for Understanding Policing and Race in America?
The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence and the Politics of Policing in America, by Michelle S. Phelps, Princeton University Press, 304 pages, $29.95
Being a writer at the right place at the right moment is a mix of chance and preparation.
Michelle Phelps, a University of Minnesota sociologist, began researching lethal police encounters and the politics of policing in Minneapolis in 2015. She was sitting at her desk writing up the results of her research on May 25, 2020, when a Minneapolis cop killed George Floyd.
Phelps has now published The Minneapolis Reckoning, the results of reviewing her years of research through the lens of Floyd’s death and the ensuing unsuccessful push to defund the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). It argues that Minneapolis, a progressive, majority-white city marked by a history of police violence and racial segregation, is a “secret bellwether city for understanding race and policing in America” and “a test case for both the possibilities and limits of liberal police reform.”
I’ll admit I sighed a little when I read those lines. Last year I reviewed The Riders Come Out At Night, a similar history of corruption in the Oakland Police Department and the multi-decade effort to clean it up. The authors described Oakland as “the edge case in American policing.” And by my count, there have been two books and a prestige TV drama about a crooked police task force in Baltimore—another city that social critics have turned to as a cipher for understanding policing and race in America.
But Minneapolis certainly deserves special attention, as the site both of Floyd’s killing and of the torching of a precinct building in the unrest that followed. Those would become two of the most significant images of the year, the former launching global protests while the latter polarized and calcified the discourse over those protests.
Minneapolis was also one of a few cities that actually did seriously consider defunding the police. (Despite the apocalyptic warnings of police unions and Republican politicians at the time, the vast majority of major cities’ police budgets either increased or remained level following the summer of 2020.) On June 7, 2020, nine of Minneapolis’ 13 city council members stood on a stage and declared that they were taking immediate steps to end the MPD, saying it “cannot be reformed and will never be held accountable for their actions.”
But Minneapolis voters rejected a 2021 ballot initiative that would have amended the city’s charter to remove mandatory staffing levels for police (a provision Minneapolis’ police union successfully lobbied to have inserted in 1961), shifted control of the police from the mayor’s office to the city council, and most controversially, replaced the MPD with an umbrella public health agency, the Department of Public Safety. That new department could include, but did not mandate, police officers.
Opponents cast the failure of th
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