Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey doubled down on his stance against dismantling the city’s police department during an ABC News interview on Monday morning.
Frey’s latest remarks come days after he was roundly booed by protesters for saying that he is “absolutely for a massive shift, a structural shift in how the police department functions” but that he is against abolishing the entire police department.
Shortly after Frey’s remarks aired, the Minneapolis City Council announced its support to dissolve its police department in light of officers using aggressive tactics such as tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse peaceful protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
Frey reacted to the city council’s move by echoing his earlier remarks, saying that he supports a “massive, structural and transformational reform” to a system that “has not for generations worked for black and brown people” but that he’s against the notion of dismantling the police department.
“We have failed them, and we need to entirely reshape the system, we need a full-on cultural shift in how our Minneapolis Police Department and departments throughout the country function,” Frey said. “Am I for entirely abolishing the police department? No, I’m not.”
Frey said that in the coming days and weeks he will work with the city council and talking “directly” with them about “deciphering what particularly they mean when they say ending and abolishing.”
The Minneapolis mayor went on to add that elected officials “have been hamstrung for generations” due to the difficulty involved with terminating and disciplining officers.
“Let me be very clear: we’re going after the police union, police union contract, the arbitration provisions that mandate that we have arbitration at the end of the process and often times that reverts the officer right back to where they were to begin with,” Frey said. “We need to be able to have the culture shift, and if we’re going to do that it also means we need to have the ability to discipline officers to begin with.”
Watch Frey’s remarks below:
.@ABC NEWS EXCLUSIVE: Mayor of Minneapolis addresses the Minneapolis City Council's intent to move toward dismantling the city’s police department and police reform. “We need to be able to have the culture shift.”@MayorFrey@GStephanopoulos https://t.co/35mRF07ahv pic.twitter.com/3Bs8xthBjm
— Good Morning America (@GMA) June 8, 2020
Somebody has to be the adult. Democrats can’t start behaving like impulsive Trumptards. The Police Force needs to be reformed, and it may be that the best way to get rid of die schwine is to start a police force from the ground up. But there must be some thinking to be done and some plans to draw. That’s what I liked about Obama, he was a conservative in the real sense of the word, and thought about things and weighted options before opening his mouth.
“Defund the police” is a slogan that might have been dreamed up in the Kremlin.
“Reform the police” is a description of what’s needed.
“Fire each and every one of the police and build a new system entirely from scratch” is, technically, a type of “Reform.”
Fuck the Police is more succinct.
Makes you wonder what happens when you have a defunded / dismantled Police Department, and the next mass school shooter comes along?
Reform the holy hell out of the Departments, but be careful what you wish for in defunding / dismantling.
I’m for dismantling. Decades of police reform have failed. The department is presently undergoing review by Human Rights commission. The fact that despite horrific misconduct these individuals can then return to their jobs with back pay via private arbitration is unconscionable . It also speaks to the power of police union over citizens rights to hold the police accountable …that such was considered as part of so called reform!
So the problems are intractable, endemic & systemic in the police department. The patterns of behavior are known the individuals involved are known including the head of police union being white supremacist. This is not a system amenable to change. It is rotten to the core.
Kroll said this when asked about shootings & abuse:
“They just paid a former Minnesota Viking $385,000 in an out-of-court settlement because he was tased when he wouldn’t leave a bar,” Kroll said, apparently not considering the possibility that the police could have declined to tase him. “The cops tased him,” Kroll said.
You’re giving away money left and right in lawsuits, and you want us to take a bath? So forget it,” Kroll said, adding that the settlement with the family of Terrance Franklin particularly bothered him. Franklin, a burglary suspect, unarmed and 173 pounds, was found hiding in a basement by five officers who unleashed a dog on him. His family’s attorneys say an officer’s semiautomatic weapon accidentally went off, hitting two officers in the legs, and police responded by shooting and killing Franklin in anger.
Police claimed that Franklin attacked an officer and took control of the gun, a charge the family’s attorneys said was absurd and contradicted by evidence. The city eventually agreed to a $795,000 settlement. Kroll said that a good friend of his had killed Franklin: “stepped up and shot him in the head at close range.”
The man was unarmed!
DISMANTLE the Minneapolis police system.