Minneapolis city council worried about crime spikes after voting to abolish police

Three months after voting to dismantle the Minneapolis police department, city council members there spent much of a business meeting on Tuesday complaining about an uptick in violent crime across the city.

City council members Lisa Bender, Steve Fletcher and Andrew Johnson led off the two-hour meeting with questions about the crime wave.

All three of the council members voted on June 12 to abolish the police department in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly 9 minutes. The trio also took part in a protest on June 7 in which they took a pledge to dismantle the police department.

Fletcher told Arradondo during the city council meeting Tuesday that constituents told him that rank-and-file police officers were “not doing anything to prevent robberies” in a neighborhood called Marcy Holmes. He also decried “a significant increase in extremely dangerous and reckless driving.”

“I’d love to know a little more about what the robbery suppression work is and what are we doing what’s been sort of a pattern in Marcy over the past six weeks?” Fletcher asked Arradondo.