(C) Common Dreams
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Cities Ask if It’s Time to Defund Police and ‘Reimagine’ Public Safety [1]

['Farah Stockman', 'John Eligon']

Date: 2020-06-05

“We have an opportunity to reimagine what the future of public safety looks like,” said Steve Fletcher, a City Council member who pushed that effort. But he acknowledged that the effort to build a viable alternative to the police on social and mental health issues would take years and that no one could be sure what it would look like in the end.

“It’s very easy as an activist to call for the abolishment of the police,” said Mr. Fletcher, himself a former activist who protested a 2015 police shooting. “It is a heavier decision when you realize that it’s your constituents that are going to be the victims of crime you can’t respond to if you dismantle that without an alternative.”

Black activists in the city have been calling for the police to be dismantled for years, issuing a report in 2018 that argued that the oppression of poor people and black people was baked into the very founding of the department in 1867. Police reform has roiled politics in the city for years, and politicians who have been seen as slow to reform have been defeated. But only recently have calls to dismantle the police been widely embraced by white leaders in the city.

In Linden Hills, a predominantly white Minneapolis neighborhood near a golf course and two lakes that has not seen very many of the overly aggressive police tactics that the city’s black residents complain about, residents acknowledge that the department needs to be significantly reformed. But they have been leery of pledges to abolish the police.

“What does that even mean?” asked Steve Birch, the chair of the Linden Hills Neighborhood Council. “Then who provides the public service of policing? I don’t even know how to answer that.”

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/defund-police-floyd-protests.html

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