Minneapolis: Black Leaders Speak Out Against ‘Abolish the Police’

Black leaders in Minneapolis, Minnesota, are beginning to speak out against proposals to “defund” or “abolish” the police, after the Democrat-dominated city council voted unanimously to dismantle the city’s police department last month.

As Breitbart News reported, the city council adopted a resolution to replace the police with a “community-led public safety system.” Dismantling the police will take further legal steps, however, and Mayor Jacob Frey opposes the idea.

Moreover, the Minneapolis Star Tribune recently reported (and RedState noted), there is strong pushback from black leaders against the radical proposals by Black Lives Matter:

Egregious, grotesque, absurd, crazy, ridiculous.

These are a handful of the words that some local African American leaders are using to rebuke the Minneapolis City Council’s moves toward dismantling the Police Department, even as they demand an overhaul of law enforcement.

While the movement to defund the police has been driven by Black activists, others say that city politicians rushed the process and failed to include a police chief who has the backing of many Black residents.

“They have shown a complete disregard for the voices and perspectives of many members of the African American community,” said Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and former president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP. “We have not been consulted as the city makes its decisions, even though our community is the one most heavily impacted by both police violence and community violence.”

Adding to the irony of “defund the police,” the current police chief in Minneapolis is Medaria Arradondo — the first African American to hold that post.

A Rasmussen poll last month showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the job of a police officer is “one of the most important jobs in our country today,” and that black Americans are the most concerned about public safety.

Minneapolis is the city where an African American man, George Floyd, died in police custody after an officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. The event, captured on videotape, triggered violent protests and riots nationwide.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.