Police reform in Minneapolis and beyond

In The Minneapolis Reckoning, Michelle Phelps offers an incredibly compelling description of the many acts of resistance, and the responses prompted by that resistance, that arose from the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis. Floyd’s death at the hands of police sparked widespread protests and movements advocating for racial justice and police reform around the world. In Floyd’s death, Americans once again witnessed the regrettably recurring reality of police violence against Black men. The horrific scene captured on a young woman’s cell phone captivated the attention of the American public. It catalyzed considerations of police reform in Minneapolis while inviting Americans across political, economic, and racial lines to imagine the possibilities of reinvented or reformed models of public safety in America.

Instead of simply providing a historical chronicle of this tragic event, Phelps successfully captures the complex tapestry of interests and individuals instrumental to the pursuit of police reform in Minneapolis. While her commitment to police reform is evident throughout her writing, one of the many commendable aspects of this work is the nuance and balance she brings to presenting the complexity of views of police violence and possible remedies. She reveals the ways communal, racial, and political interests operated in both predictable and unpredictable ways to advance and frustrate efforts to reimagine the provision of public safety in Minneapolis. Phelps helps readers to understand that the complexity arising from considerations of police reform is born of complementary and contradictory ideas: the need to combat the police violence that has long been disproportionally experienced in communities of color, and the calls from within these same communities for the provision of public safety.

Over the course of six chapters, Phelps traces the evolution of efforts at police reform in Minneapolis. She begins by charting the historical disparity in policing in Black communities, sharing a New York Times report published after Floyd’s murder that documents the racial disparity in use of force incidents experienced by Black people at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. While constituting only 20 percent of the population of the city, Black people represented 60 percent of these incidents from 2015 to 2020. Phelps concomitantly notes that Black citizens were also disproportionately the victims of violence at the hands of other community members, with a murder rate 25 times higher than that of White citizens. This is one of the many documented realities presented in Phelps’s work that illustrates the need for both police reform and better police service in these communities. These competing needs often left Black residents with an ambivalence toward policing in the city. Many of them viewed the MPD as a necessary evil.