Minneapolis voters reject making consequential changes to the city's police force
- Minneapolis voters rejected big changes to policing and public safety with Ballot Question 2.
- If passed, the city government would have been directed to form a new Department of Public Safety.
Minneapolis voters on Tuesday rejected making big changes to policing and public safety in their city with Ballot Question 2.
The question came to the voters nearly 1 1/2 years after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin sparked worldwide protests over police brutality and calls for structurally reforming police in Minneapolis and other cities.
If the ballot question had received majority support, the mayor and City Council would have been directed to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety that "employs a comprehensive public health approach" to public safety. That department could've but didn't have to include police officers at all.
The question divided Minnesota's top political leaders and policing reform activists within the community. Gov. Tim Walz, US Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, and Mayor Jacob Frey, who is also seeking reelection on Tuesday, all opposed the amendment.
Frey came into office pledging to make big changes to policing in Minneapolis after the high-profile 2017 shooting of Justine Damond by a Minneapolis police officer, who was convicted of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in her death.
Attorney General Keith Ellison, prominent progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar, and a few of Frey's challengers for the mayor's office supported the measure, in addition to several civil rights groups.
But there was a lot up in the air and many yet-to-be answered questions about how the directives in Question 2 would be actually implemented in practice. Minneapolis is also facing a spike in violent crime, and has seen 79 homicides as of November 2 - far above the 48 homicides reported in all of 2019.
The fate of Question 2 also depended on the results of Minneapolis' city council races and the outcome of another ballot question, Question 1, as FiveThirtyEight recently explained.
The first ballot question, if passed, would move Minneapolis' entire structure of city government to a "strong-mayor" system that would give the mayor's office power over all city departments, including the Police Department. That system would have made it impossible for the City Council to create and oversee the new Department of Public Safety, as laid out in the text of Question 2.