For Biden to Win, Listen to Minneapolis
Not
everyone is for defunding the police. Especially those in communities that
would be most affected.
Opinion
Columnist
·
Sept. 1, 2020, 7:58 p.m. ET
There’s one thing about the people on
the Trump team that I almost admire: When they do blurt out the truth, they
really tell you the truth — in a way that’s so raw you’re left asking, “Did
they really say that out loud?”
That was certainly my thought when
Kellyanne Conway declared last week, “The
more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for
the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.”
The better it is? How could anyone be
“better” in America if we have more chaos, anarchy, vandalism and violence? It
couldn’t be better — except for one man: Donald Trump.
Alas, it’s true:
Every scene of rioting and looting is probably worth 10,000 votes for Trump’s
re-election campaign. Just ask Kellyanne.
So, Joe Biden has a real challenge on
his hands. To mobilize the majority he needs to credibly assure enough voters
that he takes both the violence seriously and its social, policing and economic
roots seriously. His “looting is not protesting” speech
in Pittsburgh on
Monday was a good start.
If you want to understand just what a
challenge Biden faces in this election, though, study the struggle in my
hometown, Minneapolis, over policing. It’s a face-off between some unlikely
foes and, so, it reveals deep truths.
On one side are the super liberals on
the Minneapolis City Council. They voted in June, after George Floyd’s death at the hands of the local
police, to begin a process to remove the requirement of the City Charter to
maintain a police department. It would be replaced with “a department of
community safety and violence prevention,” with a director who would have
“non-law enforcement experience in community safety services, including but not
limited to public health and/or restorative justice approaches.” A division of
“licensed peace officers” would answer to that director.
Among those opposing
this change is a budding coalition of Black and white community leaders from
North Minneapolis, the historical home of the Minneapolis Black community. (I
was born in the Northside in 1953 when it was also the home of the Jewish
community.) They are unnerved by the notion of dismantling the police force for
a vague alternative at a time when their neighborhood has experienced a surge in
gang shootings, lootings and drug dealing — all exacerbated by the pandemic,
spiraling unemployment and demoralized police officers, who, after the Floyd killing,
don’t always have the numbers or the will to show up.
On Aug. 18, this
coalition — four Black and four white families from North Minneapolis — filed
suit against the City Council and the mayor, Jacob Frey, to compel them to
maintain the legal minimum of police officers on the Minneapolis force. The
families contend that the Council’s actions have driven out too many police
officers and curtailed the hiring of replacements, endangering their
neighborhood.
Don’t get them wrong, the plaintiffs
argue, they want thoughtful and deep police reform. But they want both a better police
force and enough police
officers to protect their kids and their streets — not either the present
unreformed police or a
disbanded police department and an uncertain replacement.
The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported on Aug. 1 that since the killing of George Floyd in late
May, the city’s police force is down at least 100 officers, more than 10
percent of the force, “straining department resources amid a wave of violence.”
The department, the newspaper added, is budgeted for 888 officers this year,
but could lose as much as a third of its work force by year’s end — through
resignations, firings and medical leave for post-traumatic stress from the
violence that followed Floyd’s death.
In an Aug. 24 op-ed in
The Star Tribune, Sondra and Don Samuels, two of the Black plaintiffs,
explained why they are suing. I know them both, and they are deeply involved in
improving their Northside neighborhood. Sondra is the chief executive of the
Northside Achievement Zone, and Don, her husband, is a former City Council
member, former Minneapolis school board member and chief executive of
Microgrants, a local nonprofit.
“We want radical police reform, where
all citizens are treated as fully human by all cops, and not just by the ‘good
ones’ we all know well,” they wrote. “We support the reform moves of the mayor
and chief, which include community alternatives to policing that work
hand-in-hand with our police force.”
The State Legislature, they also
argued, “must change arbitration rules that too often demand bad cops be
rehired after being fired for abusive policing.”
But, they added: “We will not sacrifice
the safety of our community in the pursuit of the City Council’s lofty goals
with no plan to back them up. In the months since George Floyd’s murder, we
have seen an explosion in crime and homicides. Five of us live just a few
houses apart. Four of us have children in our homes. Here’s what we’ve
experienced on our block alone over the last two months:
“A mother’s car was
shot up with eight bullets, with her infant on board. Another car was shot four
times. A bullet went through the front door and a wall of our neighbor’s home.
A woman was kicked and stomped within inches of her life in the middle of the
street. The drug trade has been revived in two homes, to unprecedented levels,
with conflicts resulting in fights and shootouts.”
Their neighbors, they warned, “are
leaving their Northside homes to stay with relatives to keep their children
safe. Neighbors have put their house up for sale and others are considering it
for the first time.”
This is the bottom line: “By charter
the Council must maintain a per capita force in the mid-700s of active duty
officers. While this is not enough for our needs, we worry that the Council’s
naïve intent is to take us well below this number. And we are not having it. If
the leadership of the city cannot muster the wisdom to keep us safe, it must
muster the compliance to obey the law that is designed to do so.”
Besides big stores, like Saks and Nordstrom, which were vandalized last week in
downtown Minneapolis — after rumors spread
that the police had shot a Black man, who, it turned out, had actually
committed suicide — a slew of Northside businesses owned by people of color
were looted or vandalized during the George Floyd protests, and many owners are
now afraid to rebuild.
Think about the Northside Achievement
Zone that Sondra runs. It’s working with parents, students and local partners
in predominantly Black North Minneapolis to end multigenerational poverty
through education and fostering family stability. It’s been a real engine for
building healthy community and enabling Black Americans to realize their full potential.
But it can’t work in chaos.
“We have to be able to say both that
Black lives matter and that protests that turn violent cannot be allowed to
tear up our city,” Sondra said to me.
But we have to say a third thing, she
continued — it’s what Martin Luther King Jr. said in the late 1960s, and it’s
as relevant today as it was then.
King decried riots as
“self-defeating,” but he also pointed out that “a riot is the language of the unheard. And what
is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of
the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. … It has failed to hear
that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. It has failed to
hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquillity
and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real
sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of
delay.”
Economic progress and social justice,
King argued, “are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”
Which is why Biden, if he frames it
right, can be the real “law and order” candidate in this election. Because he’s
not for disbanding the police, but for improving them — which is how you build
respect for the law from everyone — and because Biden knows that
sustainable order can only come from a president who wants to build healthy and
just communities, not from a president who thinks it’s “better” for him
politically if they’re torn apart.
