Calls for Transforming Police Run Into Realities of Governing in Minnesota – The New York Times

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Wayne Reyes Jr., whose father was shot and killed by Minneapolis police officers in 2006, said he was hopeful that lawmakers would make meaningful changes this time, but said he was angry it had taken more killings for them to do so. Derek Chauvin, the former officer who has been charged with killing Mr. Floyd, was one of the officers who opened fire at Mr. Reyes’s father, Wayne Reyes Sr., a Native American man who the police said aimed a shotgun at them.

“It seems like people have been asking for these changes for a long time,” Mr. Reyes, 35, said in an interview, “and it wasn’t until just the last couple of weeks that people are starting to look and listen a little bit.”

On Friday, Minneapolis’s efforts to alter policing in the city appeared mostly to be a slow, governmental grind. To achieve its aims of dismantling the Police Department as it currently exists, the City Council plans to ask voters to approve rewriting a section of the City Charter to eliminate a provision that dictates a minimum number of police officers. That change would give council members much more flexibility to divert funds to mental health and other agencies that could respond to calls traditionally handled by the police.

The ballot initiative would also include removing the Minneapolis Police Department from the charter — although not necessarily abolishing it altogether — and adding a new department “focused on cultivating public safety.”

The City Council also voted unanimously, at its virtual meeting, on a resolution to commit to a yearlong effort to research other models of public safety and to listen to what residents say they would like to see.

Andrea Jenkins, the vice president of the City Council, said the world was looking to Minneapolis to see how it would respond after the killing of Mr. Floyd last month.

“People have marched all over the world, all over the city of Minneapolis, and what they’re saying to us is they want change,” Ms. Jenkins said. “Not ‘fix it,’ not reform, but change. So we must take these voices seriously.”

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/us/minneapolis-police-defunding.html

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