Community policing might be possible in Minneapolis—if you can pay for it.
In a recent proposal introduced by Minneapolis City Council member Michael Rainville, a cluster of wealthy downtown neighborhoods in the city indicated their desire to raise private funds to pay for an increased police presence in their communities.
Relations between the Minneapolis Police Department and communities of color have not improved since Floyd’s murder. There have been several instances of police brutality and violence since then.
The proposal is known as the Mill District Public Safety Project, a reference to Minneapolis’s residential neighborhoods that have sprouted up in Downtown East in recent years along the Mississippi River. That’s where flour mills once stood, giving rise to the city’s industrial framework and late-nineteenth century growth spurt.
These days, steel and glass condo buildings line the streets where factories, flour mills, and warehouses once stood. There’s a Trader Joe’s on the ground floor of one residential building, as well as the usual smattering of pricey, artisanal food and beverage outfits that tend to crop up around high-end condos and lofts.
Rainville was elected to the city council in 2021, and he represents Ward 3, which includes many downtown neighborhoods. The area has seen an explosion of gentrification-driven growth in the past two decades, where new investments—including a glittering, nearly billion-dollar football stadium for the Minnesota Vikings—have displaced lower-income residents.
Kicking poor people out of downtown Minneapolis has been a goal of elected officials since long before Rainville’s time. In the late 1950s, public and civic officials succeeded in demolishing the city’s central Gateway District, which was host to cheap housing for temporary and transient workers, many of whom worked in the state’s logging and milling industries.
Over time, the area became an embarrassment to local officials. Public drunkenness, gambling, and sex work had been allowed to flourish in the Gateway District, thanks to police officers who were paid by business owners to look the other way. Eventually, as white families began moving en masse to the suburbs, city officials got the go-ahead to destroy this community and remake a large swath of Minneapolis.
Though the Gateway’s physical structures are long gone, a battle remains over who belongs downtown, and who deserves police protection.
Rainville is a longtime Ward 3 resident whose aunt, Alice Rainville, also served on the city council. In 2021, he unseated former Ward 3 Representative Steve Fletcher in a contest that was largely connected to the question of how, or if, the Minneapolis Police Department should be reformed in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
Tony Webster via Creative Commons
A majority of the Minneapolis City Council committed to defunding and dismantling the Minneapolis Police Department before a crowd gathered at Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on June 7, 2020.
Fletcher was in office in 2020 and was one of the majority of Minneapolis city council members who publicly indicated, just days after Floyd was killed, that they would support a massive restructuring and rebudgeting—if not outright defunding—of the city’s police force.
This stance floundered in the face of resistance from entrenched forces, including Mayor Jacob Frey and Medaria Arradondo, who retired as chief of police shortly after the 2021 election. The call to dramatically reshape the Minneapolis Police Department was also quickly subsumed by fears over the perceived local and national rise in violent crime, including carjackings and gun violence.
While Rainville crafted a centrist campaign by advocating for retaining, if not increasing, police staffing and funding levels, Fletcher publicly accused Minneapolis police officers of engaging in a retaliatory work slowdown as a form of protest against calls to defund their department.
In the end, Fletcher lost his seat and Rainville became the Ward 3 representative. Now, Rainville has announced his support for a partial privatization of Minneapolis’s police force, on behalf of some of the city’s wealthiest residents, through the Mill District Public Safety Project.
This project could be described as an unhealthy workaround when it comes to actual police reform. A recent article in the Minnesota Reformer noted that those in favor of Rainville’s proposal, including Rainville himself, have described it as a way to reinstate community policing by bringing beat cops back to parts of downtown Minneapolis, as a side hustle for officers who would volunteer for the work and earn $107 per hour in additional pay.
But for whose benefit? Relations between the Minneapolis Police Department and communities of color have seemingly not improved since Floyd’s murder; in fact, there have been several high-profile instances of police brutality and violence since then.
In the past few months police officers have also repeatedly harassed and removed unhoused residents—including in Ward 3. This should raise significant questions about who is and isn’t likely to feel safe under Rainville’s proposal.
Currently, a fundraising campaign for Rainville’s proposal is underway. Those who support it can donate money through Give MN, a local fundraising platform that promises to raise funds for “amazing nonprofits and schools.” The Mill District Public Safety Project is described on the group’s website as a “unique public/private/police partnership to promote a safer neighborhood.”
The GiveMN site notes that anyone with questions about the project is asked to call a representative of North Star Lofts, where units can be purchased for upward of $2 million. That alone seems to indicate that this public safety plan is more of a wealth protection plan than a true community policing proposal.