A little more than a year has passed since Minneapolis City Council members pledged to defund the city’s police department, but a judge Thursday ruled that the city must keep approximately 730 officers on staff.
According to the Star Tribune, Hennepin County Judge Jamie L. Anderson ordered the city council to maintain the level of police called for in the Minneapolis city charter, equivalent to .0017 employees per resident. That means Minneapolis needs either 730.33 officers or the number that would equal 0.0017 of the city's 2020 census population, when that figure is published later this year, whichever is higher.
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His decision was in response to a suit filed last year by eight activists represented by the Upper Midwest Law Center. These petitioners cited high levels of violent crime, especially in poor and minority neighborhoods, as the basis for their complaint.
Members of the Minneapolis City Council voted to defund the department last summer following the murder of George Floyd – an unarmed Black man – at the hands of Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis Police Department officer. Chauvin was convicted of third-degree murder as well as manslaughter charges and sentenced last month to 22 1/2 years in prison.
Floyd’s murder inspired protests against racism and police brutality worldwide.
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However, plans to change the department were already losing steam reported NPR this May. By November, a draft charter amendment that called for replacing the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention was halted by the city’s charter commission before going before voters.
In his ruling, Anderson said Mayor Jacob Frey and the City Council “failed to perform an official duty clearly imposed by law,” in not following the charter.
Frey has called plans to cap the number of police officers in the city "irresponsible", according to CBS.
While there were 743 officers on the Minneapolis force this April, 92 of them on leave for at least 78 hours or more during that pay period, said the Star Tribune. Additionally, the Police Department had projected that as of last month it would have 690 sworn officers on payroll and 46 on long-term leaves. The department expects to have just 649 officers on the force by January 2022 and 721 by January 2023.
Anderson said the city should also be more proactive about using up-to-date census numbers to determine how many officers to employ. To this point, the city argued that charter demands it use the latest "decennial federal census" and that the number of positions should be at 650.38.
“This isn't about having more police officers,” said petitioner Sondra Samuels of the suit, according to the Star Tribune. “We want a sufficient level of staffing and ... in accordance with the city charter. We demand sufficient staffing levels so that 83 percent of the shooting victims in Minneapolis are not Black.”
Samuels is the president and CEO of the Northside Achievement Zone and is the wife of former Minneapolis City Council member Don Samuels.