MINNEAPOLIS (Legal Newsline) - The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that a proposition that would let Minnesota cities vote to defund their police departments will stay on the ballot for the upcoming Nov. 2 election.
“The court made this decision literally the day before early voting started probably to avoid larger electoral confusion that they saw possibly happening," said University of Minnesota Law School professor David Schultz.
“That's what factored into it. Had they pulled it from the ballot, there would have been problems with early voting and there would have been another effort to try to change the language but it's too late to change the ballot, basically.”
The state high court overruled a lower court’s decision that would have withdrawn the policing initiative.
"What started with George Floyd's murder is ending with the reform movement having its say on how public safety is going to be addressed in this city," Schultz told Legal Newsline.
The ballot initiative emerged after the death of George Floyd last year by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, who was convicted of Floyd’s murder. Floyd was Black.
“A lot of policing now involves an incredible amount of social work,” said Schultz, an election law expert. “If there were some reallocating of funding for general safety, there might still be some regular police officers but many might be replaced with social workers because the argument is being made that not every police call needs the old fashioned big and beefy intimidating officer who is armed with guns to show force.”
If approved by voters, the ballot initiative will remove provisions from the Minneapolis charter that require a police department to exist and a certain ratio of police officers based upon police expenditures and population.
“It would give the city council more discretion to do what it wants regarding how to allocate funding for public safety in general,” Schultz said. “For people who opposed the ballot initiative, they read it as defunding the police but, in reality, the city council would still have to vote to defund the police. It’s not automatically defunded because the ballot initiative passes.”
Big League Politics reported that supporters of defunding the police have allegedly pushed to dismantle the Minneapolis police department by hiring private security officers but Schultz said hiring private security officers raises issues of accountability and costs.
“When you contract out, the costs are actually higher oftentimes and there's also an accountability issue,” he said. “When you have a police department working for you directly, it's a little bit easier for you to hire and fire where if you've got a private contractor, that private contractor’s interest might be different than yours in terms of what they want to do.”