Two years ago, after a handcuffed George Floyd was killed by Sgt. Derek Chauvin during a controversial police arrest, the city of 420,000 dissolved into nights and weeks of protests, riots, assaults, and arson.
Instead of beefing up the outnumbered police force with more training and more protective equipment, Randy Sutton of The Wounded Blue says the City of Minneapolis added insult to injury by cutting the police force off at the knees.
“The woke city council and Mayor [Jacob] Frey lost their collective minds,” he says,
“and wanted to ‘reimagine’ it. They wanted to defund it.”
In 2020, that summer of protests and riots included a “Defund the Police” demand from far-left activists, and far-left politicians responded to the mob-like demand with “reimagining” the role of law enforcement and slashing police department budgets. At the end of 2020, the Minneapolis City Council had voted to “shift” $8 million in police funding but also voted to keep the police force at its current level after Mayor Frey objected to a plan to drop approximately 140 officers from the force.
Yet approximately 300 police officers have quit or retired anyway. With fewer police on the streets, a group of concerned citizens sued the city because its own charter requires it to maintain a current police force of 731 officers that reflects the city’s current population.
“They lost hundreds and hundreds of police officers,” Sutton points out. “Nobody wants to join the police department for very valid reasons.”
Sutton suspects the far-left city leaders intend to keep punishing the city's police department but are being cooperative because of the court order.
