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• POLICY AND POLITICS NEKIMA LEVY ARMSTRONG, 44 MINNEAPOLIS Both the mayor and the city council have done a poor job of managing the crisis that currently exists and the crisis in policing that existed before George Floyd was killed. They have all had ample opportunity to use their political power to help change the structural racism happening within the Minneapolis police department, to have a more rigorous system of discipline, and of accountability and transparency, and they haven’t done it. And so from my perspective, the city council was looking to take the heat off of itself by showing up in Powderhorn Park one day in June, and declaring that they were going to abolish the police, dismantle the police, but they hadn’t done any due diligence, any community engagement, they hadn’t even come to the Black community, which is at higher risk for negative encounters with police as well as community violence. They didn’t do any of that. So it was just very poor governance and poor timing—in the sense of trying to capture headlines to look like you’re going to abolish the police when you don’t even have the political authority to take that kind of action. And those of us who have been out here fighting, we knew then that Minneapolis City Council had not taken any steps to reform the police department. So we didn’t take what they were doing seriously as a solution, because they had missed so many intermediate steps, and so many intermediate decision points, and to try to just engage the public to see what do we want the future of public safety to look like? Not a single city council member has a background in policing or reform or any of that. And when we saw the city council president, Lisa Bender, go on CNN and try to defend her position, it was clear she was not well versed on any of these issues, and couldn’t answer basic questions from Chris Cuomo. And it was embarrassing, quite frankly, to witness that because none of it had to happen. And then when you look at the description of what they are proposing, a couple things strike me: one, the fact that that new office will be headed 77

by a non-law-enforcement head. That to me is a clear directive to get rid of the first Black chief in the history of the city of Minneapolis, the one who actually had the courage to fire the four officers who killed George Floyd. So they did that on purpose. And I’m thinking, “How would law enforcement be answering to a non-law-enforcement person who’s not trained in any of that?” That would create some very weird dynamics. And then their proposal also calls for some police to still be here. So it’s not abolition of the police. Beyond that, they are also just disseminating power from having the mayor oversee the police department to having city council members and the mayor. So that’s power divided by fourteen people. And this is a group that we’re expecting to get along with each other, to be in agreement about what’s in the best interest of the city, when most of them do not have a strong relationship with the Black community to know what we need, to know what we want. We don’t expect them to make decisions that are in our best interest. If that was going to be the case, they would have done it by now. BARB CAMPBELL, 56 BEND, OREGON There’s a group in town that is a newly formed forum around the George Floyd protests, and I saw that on their page, they had a live video going of the ICE action. Some people were standing in front of a couple of ICE buses, trying to keep two buses from leaving the parking lot of a hotel here in Bend.* As I was leaving the house, I got a phone call from a local activist saying, “Barb, you know what’s going on? Can you come down here?” I told her I had already heard about it and that I was on my way. Throughout that day, I was texting our mayor, trying to get her to come down to the protest.† Telling her that the crowd wants to hear from you, that you’re the mayor that they want you to talk to them, and right now that * Later that night, there was a violent clash between the protesters who’d come to block the ICE buses from removing two undocumented immigrants who lived in the area and the federal agents who arrived to clear the scene. † The mayor of Bend, Sally Russell, works on the city council with Barb Campbell. 78

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POLICY AND POLITICS

NEKIMA LEVY ARMSTRONG, 44

MINNEAPOLIS

Both the mayor and the city council have done a poor job of managing the crisis that currently exists and the crisis in policing that existed before George Floyd was killed. They have all had ample opportunity to use their political power to help change the structural racism happening within the Minneapolis police department, to have a more rigorous system of discipline, and of accountability and transparency, and they haven’t done it. And so from my perspective, the city council was looking to take the heat off of itself by showing up in Powderhorn Park one day in June, and declaring that they were going to abolish the police, dismantle the police, but they hadn’t done any due diligence, any community engagement, they hadn’t even come to the Black community, which is at higher risk for negative encounters with police as well as community violence. They didn’t do any of that. So it was just very poor governance and poor timing—in the sense of trying to capture headlines to look like you’re going to abolish the police when you don’t even have the political authority to take that kind of action. And those of us who have been out here fighting, we knew then that Minneapolis City Council had not taken any steps to reform the police department. So we didn’t take what they were doing seriously as a solution, because they had missed so many intermediate steps, and so many intermediate decision points, and to try to just engage the public to see what do we want the future of public safety to look like? Not a single city council member has a background in policing or reform or any of that. And when we saw the city council president, Lisa Bender, go on CNN and try to defend her position, it was clear she was not well versed on any of these issues, and couldn’t answer basic questions from Chris Cuomo. And it was embarrassing, quite frankly, to witness that because none of it had to happen.

And then when you look at the description of what they are proposing, a couple things strike me: one, the fact that that new office will be headed

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