It would be wrong to let the Nov. 2 Minneapolis vote get buried in the usual tsunami of news, because it was an extraordinarily significant event. At issue, you might recall, was Question 2: whether to get rid of the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a “Department of Public Safety” that, in its ambiguity and incoherence, sounds like it could have sprung from the brain of Carroll Fife. Minneapolitans (yes, that’s what residents are called) said to hell with that. They voted “NO” resoundingly, and by a 56% to 43% margin, vowed to keep their 154-year old department. They thus administered a huge blow to the supporters of Question 2, who included the Black Visions Collective, U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, and Minnesota Attorney-General Keith Ellison.
But it also would be wrong to assume that most Black Minneapolitans supported Question 2. In fact, they hated it. “The largely Black North Side neighborhoods hit hardest by violent crime…delivered the votes that defeated a nationally watched ballot question seeking to replace the Minneapolis Police Department,” reported the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The newspaper quoted a Black man who lives in an area heavily impacted by violent crime: “We need the police. Plain and simple. Who [else] is going to protect people?”
The reason the Minneapolis vote is so important is because it didn’t happen in just any old city. It happened in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by a cop in May, 2020. In Minneapolis, where “Justice for George” and Black Lives Matter street protests originated and quickly spread across the country, including in Oakland. If any American city could have been expected to abolish its police department, it was Minneapolis. The fact that abolition was rejected, and by such a compelling majority, sends a powerful message to anti-police types. As Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association head Brian Peter noted of the vote, “This should be a wakeup call to politicians who want to simply abolish and defund police departments.”
It should be but, of course, it won’t be a wakeup call to anti-police politicians, who dwell in ideology-induced comas which reality is not permitted to penetrate. We haven’t heard a peep from Fife about Minneapolis, although she must loathe and fear the result. Nor have we heard a word from the representative of the Anti Police-Terror Project, Cat Brooks, whose website, bizarrely, continues to insist: “We must Defund OPD!”
These cop-haters not only choose to ignore the reality of Minneapolis, they ignore the fact that, across America, defund-the-police efforts are being crushed in city after city: Buffalo. Long Island. Seattle. Westmoreland County, PA. In Cleveland, where Blacks comprise nearly 50% of the population, that city’s Mayor-elect, who is Black, tweeted, “Let me say this loud and clear: ‘Defund the police’ is the worst label in American political history.’”
One can argue that the pending recall of Chesa Boudin as San Francisco District Attorney also represents a backlash to the anti-cop movement. Here in Oakland, both the City Council poll and the Chamber of Commerce poll prove that supermajorities of Oaklanders want the same level, or more, of police staffing, and strongly oppose defunding. We can even include the nation’s largest city, New York, on this list, because Eric Adams, a former New York Police Captain, who won the recent mayoral race (and who happens to be Black) “did not support defunding police.”
Memo to Fife, Brooks and the other defunders: It’s clear where the American people stand. And you’re not with them.
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