Minneapolis City officials are announcing new public safety recommendations from a recent Harvard report outlining a long-term plan, more than three years after the death of George Floyd sparked protests calling for change.
Mayor Jacob Frey says duties like traffic control and behavioral crisis control issues will be dealt with by teams of trained professionals rather than by law enforcement.
“This frees up police officers’ time to be dealing with the more critical circumstances,” Frey said.
Harvard professor Dr. Antonio Oftelie, a Minneapolis native, led the two-year-long study of the city. He says his work was impacted by Floyd’s death.
“I was in Boston and saw what happened with the murder of George Floyd, and it was gut-wrenching,” Oftelie said. “The light was shining on Minneapolis, and we wanted to be part of something where we could say, ‘OK, let’s take that light down and do something dramatically different.”
Oftelie called the report the “most ambitious plan around public safety in the nation.”
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