Creative Commons
Minneapolis teachers on strike in March 2022.
It has been almost two years since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer with the assistance of three other officers. All four have been found guilty of a range of crimes, from murder to violating Floyd’s civil rights.
So what has changed in Minneapolis since then, regarding police conduct and accountability?
It could be easy to conclude that the Minneapolis Police Department is being treated with kid gloves, despite decades of acting with impunity and recklessness.
Not much, it seems. On March 24, the Minneapolis City Council members approved a new contract with the Police Officers’ Federation of Minneapolis on an 8-5 vote, and the details are eye-popping—especially considering the violent and troubling track record of the city’s police department, before and after Floyd’s murder.
Here is a quick overview of what the new contract provides to the Minneapolis Police Department:
- $7,000 bonuses for new or existing police officers, provided they are employed with the department by the end of 2022;
- pay increases, both retroactive and current, that will amount to a 7.5 percent salary bump by next year;
- and access to the names of anyone who files a public data request seeking information about an officer’s conduct, ostensibly so officers can understand how such information will impact their employment files.
There was a sense of urgency around settling this contract, thanks to endless news reports about rising crime and Minneapolis’s shrinking police force. There are currently 622 police officers in Minneapolis—some 300 fewer than there were before Floyd was murdered and the city erupted in protest.
Minneapolis city official Holland Atkinson has argued that increasing police salaries and offering a generous bonus will allow the city to attract new officers in what has become a highly competitive hiring market, according to a report from Minnesota Public Radio.
Scarcity, in other words, breeds desperation and results in public entities like the police force being flooded with much-needed resources. Or does it?
Let’s ask the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers to weigh in on this.
On March 8, more than 3,000 teachers and support staffers in the Minneapolis Public Schools walked off their jobs in the city’s first teachers’ strike since 1970. On March 25, after nearly three weeks on strike, the district and union announced they had reached a tentative agreement.
In the agreement, which was ratified by a majority of union members on March 27, teachers will receive a 5 percent salary increase over two years. This is more money than teachers are earning now, but it is far less than either the current rate of inflation or the initial amount—20 percent—that the union had recently demanded, as a way to make up for all of the income loss they’ve experienced during the past two decades.
The strike wasn’t just about money, of course. It was about class sizes, mental health staffing, and the district’s ability to recruit and retain educators of color. (The union says more than 600 teachers and support staff have left the district in the past eighteen months due to low wages and stressful working conditions.)
The Education Support Professionals (ESPs) branch of the union settled its own contract on March 25, after striking alongside teachers, and reported more overall gains, including a boost in pay that will push more ESPs towards the union’s goal of a $35,000 starting salary.
ESPs will also receive bonuses worth $6,000 over two years. This is good news, but it does invite a comparison between the teacher and support staff contracts and that of the Minneapolis police union—police officers did not have to walk off the job in order to secure bonuses and a raise.
It could be easy to conclude that the Minneapolis Police Department is being treated with kid gloves, despite decades of acting with impunity and recklessness against the very people that not only pay their salaries, through tax dollars, but are also supposed to be protected by these officers.
Unchecked and uncorrected police misconduct in Minneapolis has instead cost taxpayers millions of dollars. The family of Justine Damond, who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in 2017, was awarded more than $20 million; this was the highest payout on record until the city agreed in 2021 to a $27 million settlement with George Floyd’s family.
Still, the money hasn’t prevented officers from engaging in harmful behavior. Even Bob Kroll, the disgraced former president of the Police Officers’ Federation of Minneapolis, has hung on as the union’s lobbyist.
Why, then, is the Minneapolis City Council so willing to continue business as usual by generously settling the police union contract seemingly without insisting on deep and substantial changes to the department?
Meanwhile, teachers and support staff professionals, who do the “real community healing,” as one Minneapolis teacher noted on Twitter, have had to put their jobs on the line and miss at least one paycheck in order to eke out some relatively minor pay increases.
This seems like a lesson Minneapolis residents have already learned. We have an emboldened police department—newly flush with cash—on one hand and a shrinking public school district on the other.
So far, this has led us to a place of expensive agony, with dollars flowing to police and the families of those they kill while children and teachers must make do with whatever is left over.