Minneapolis Voters Will Decide Future of City's Public Safety This Fall

<p>The coalition Yes4Minneapolis gathered more than 20,000 signatures to get its proposal onto voter’s ballots. If a majority of voters approve, the city’s charter would no longer require Minneapolis to have a police department. Instead, MPD would be replaced by a Department of Public Safety and a new commissioner to lead it. </p><p>--</p><p><em>Racial Reckoning reporter Tiffany Bui interviewed JaNaé Bates, communications director for </em><a href="https://yes4minneapolis.org/"><em>Yes4Minneapolis</em></a><em>, to find out more about the charter amendment that will be on the Minneapolis ballot this November. Here’s an excerpt of their conversation. </em></p><p><br></p><p><strong>TB: What was the process to craft the charter language amendment?</strong></p><p><br></p><p>JB: It's been a long process, because the campaign itself is a coalition. So that means that there are organizations involved, there are families across Minneapolis, their small businesses, there's church communities. </p><p><br></p><p>But to be clear, like this charter amendment, the biggest thing that it does is remove a barrier. Right? So currently, we have a barrier in the city charter for Minneapolis, that prevents the people of Minneapolis, the residents of Minneapolis making any real, any real concrete changes to how policing is done, because it puts the city in a box to where we really only have a </p><p>police-only model. And so when we wanted to create this language that folks get to vote on in November, we want to be clear that it is really just about removing the barrier to make it possible for people to use all of the tools in our tool belt to keep us safe. </p><p><br></p><p>So that means yes, most certainly, you know, licensed peace officers are known as police officers when they're necessary, but also knowing that we call on them for way too many things that they aren't necessarily qualified, trained for or disciplined enough to handle. And so we also want to make sure that we're implementing proven strategies, you know, vio