> particularly when people are scared by elevated violent crime numbers.

Crime has been down from the 1990s to 2020. People has been more and more scare of less and less crime.

> "defund the police" led Minneapolis to actually start working towards dismantling its police department

That is not the case, reading your link they are creating a "Department of Public Safety in Minneapolis to oversee policing, violence prevention, and community safety programs". So, from your link, nobody is dismantling the police department but they are changing its responsibilities and structure to be more effective with the current challenges.

> some extremists literally want to do that in New York

"extremists"

> need to see a policy framework worked out in smaller cities before they can be applied to New York

That is reasonable. Even better is to apply it to New York but in small scale. A little town and New York have little in common.

Nobody is dismantling the police department here because as soon as they started talking about abolishing it, crime spiked and the community fought back.

There's an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the debacle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_abolition_movement_in...

The Wikipedia page indeed is interesting. As I note above, it mentions the shift of 4.5% of the police budget to violence prevention and mental health response teams. In addition, if you look at violent crime in Minneapolis, the chronology of the spike doesn't line up with your contentions. It does line up with economic effects of the coronavirus and with the effects of the protests here (I'm including arson committed by folks from outstate MN or WI here, and I don't think that ought to be blamed on Minneapolitans. That stuff stopped when we shut down the highways, and if suburbanites and rural folks stopped driving here to commit their crimes and buy their drugs we'd all be better off.)

The situation in Minneapolis is complex, but we're all confused by the fact that all the new developments are selling condos starting at $900,000 and you can get artisanal hand-made tacos from Nixta and stand in line for a block in this dystopian ghost town to spend $17 on a pizza from Boludo.... But hey, gotta serve the narrative, eh?

Keep in mind that crime statistics have been skewed lately. After George Floyd hit the news, some neighborhoods banded together (Powderhorn at least I think) and vowed to not call the police for anything less than an emergency, opting instead for active neighnorhood watches.

I suspect the momentum on that died out after awhile, but haven't really kept abreast of it.

What I do know is that a large employer is moving out of NE minneapolis to the burbs (my friend works there) because, after having to install bullet proof windows in their office, the CEO said enough was enough. (Incidentally, this place is only a few blocks from where the first parts of the dismembered guy were found).

Oh Lord almighty. A few council members in Minneapolis speak some words for show and people are taking this seriously??

The city charter commission is responsible for approving this "defund the police" measure and they're never ever ever gonna do it. It's an unelected body, appointed by the Chief Judge of Hennepin County (not even the city).

Yeah, Mayor Frey signed a budget that shifted $8 million from the police to mental health crisis response teams, crime prevention programs, etc. The 2020 police budget was $193 million. "Defund the police", huh -- a budget cut of less than 10% total (4% in the shift noted above).

I hate the lack of actual facts in this discussion. It's like saying I'm on a hunger strike 'cause I stopped eating Oreos.

I think if you just ask the question "should this task be done by a person with a loaded gun" about everything done by the police and put the "no"s in one pile and "yes"s in another you can start getting a good idea of the scope of the problem.

The goal should be to get to a process where the person with the loaded gun is not doing tasks in the "no" pile.

I don't care if the person doing those tasks is called a police officer or not as long as they don't have guns.

This is incredibly reasonable. It is also the sort of middle-ground policy which has limited electoral appeal at this time. It doesn't feed the law and order or defund the police yes literally bases which currently dominate the conversation.

I view Minneapolis as a very exciting experiment. Crime rates, property values, and so on, these will all be impacted and we get a chance to see how well it works out.

We will also get to witness some interesting spin and sloganeering to explain why "... and that's a Good Thing." I imagine almost every trick in lying will statistics will now appear in the wild.

Apparently shorting municipal bonds is difficult, which is too bad.