Lawns across Minneapolis look empty all of a sudden. The spider webs and jack-o-lanterns of Halloween have been tossed aside for next year, or thrown into a compost bin to become something else entirely. Gone, too, are the colorful yard signs that tell us it’s election season.
On November 2, Minneapolis residents took to the polls with an enormous task at hand. Not only were we asked to vote for a mayoral candidate, but also an entire slate of city council representatives, as all thirteen seats on the council were up for grabs this year.
What we experienced in Minneapolis was the explosion of long-supressed dreams, lit by the fire of Floyd’s agonizing murder.
There were also park and recreation board candidates to sift through—not a simple task in a city like Minneapolis, where the award-winning park system carries the weight of the past as well as new pressures.
In 2020, the park board voted to allow unhoused people to set up tents in the city’s parks, raising questions about who should be allowed to do what in the acres of greenspace and lakeside real estate that defines Minneapolis.
This year’s election was widely considered to be a referendum on whether or not such encampments belong in the parks, and so far it looks like the answer in voters’ minds is no. Most of the park board members who authorized the encampments in 2020 lost their seats to candidates promising to steer clear of debates over unhoused city residents.
Layered on top of all of this were three major ballot questions, including whether or not the city should create a Department of Public Safety to work alongside the police department.
It was a heavy lift, laden with emotion, confusion, and national attention. If voters won’t support police reform efforts in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered and a police precinct building was burned down in response, then where could it possibly succeed?
As a result of the uprisings following the police murder of George Floyd, entire city blocks in Minneapolis remain little more than piles of rubble, bound by chain link fencing. Whole swaths of largely immigrant-owned shops and restaurants are gone, with many business owners left to figure out how to rebuild or move forward on their own.
This is not the fault of those who felt so unheard and enraged by Floyd’s murder that they took to the streets in anger, inspiring millions around the world to do the same. Nearly a century ago, Langston Hughes asked us to think about what happens when the dreams of others, of those we’d rather not see or hear from, are deferred and left to “sag like a heavy load” until they finally explode.
What we experienced in Minneapolis was the explosion of long-supressed dreams, lit by the fire of Floyd’s agonizing murder. How do you answer for all of this through a ballot question? You can’t.
The police reform measure was at once too weak and too heavy to carry us forward. It was weak because it promised nothing concrete; the ballot question asked whether voters wanted to turn the city’s police department into a Department of Public Safety with no clear timeline or leadership indicated.
Plenty of pro-police outlets did their best to squash the measure and drum up fear over rising crime rates in the city. But the mostly toothless measure also raised concerns among many longtime police reform advocates.
Jae Yates works for Twin Cities Justice for Jamar, a police reform organization that formed after the 2015 police killing of Jamar Clark. In a recent interview with Minnesota Public Radio, Yates referred to the 2021 police overhaul ballot question as an “ultimately pointless stopgap” that many members of their group planned to vote against.
The ballot measure was also too heavy because it pitted communities against each other without offering a clear antidote to the pain many Minneapolis residents have endured these past couple of years.
This past spring, three children were shot in the head by stray bullets in the city’s historically underserved Northside; two of them have since died, and the third recently went home from the hospital in a wheelchair, with further rehabilitation to come. No one has been charged yet in any of these incidents.
Phillipe Cunningham is the city council member who represented that area, and has been at the forefront of the movement to rethink law enforcement in Minneapolis. He handily lost his council seat on November 2 to a candidate who has embraced a “both/and” approach to policing in Minneapolis by indicating that both police and reform are necessary.
What comes next? There are seven new Minneapolis city council members, including Robin Wonsley Worlobah, who will be the city’s first Black, female, Democratic Socialist candidate to serve in this capacity.
Hope, deferred, may indeed rise again.