Demonstrators say public safety re-imagined is a future without police

CNN — Tony Williams remembers pulling into a gas station in rural Minnesota late one night after getting lost on his way back home to Minneapolis in 2018. “I was acutely aware as a black man that my life was in danger in that moment if I didn’t have the right answers,” said Williams, an organizer with MPD150, a Minneapolis effort created by local organizers that supports the dismantling of the city’s police department and the reallocation of police funding to community-based organizations without a history of violence. “It really drove home for me that even in the most benign of circumstances, police are a threat to me.” Activists, like Williams, who are calling for the defunding and abolition of police, say the future of public safety doesn’t need to include police forces that systematically oppress black people, marginalized communities and communities of color. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti and Police Commissioner Eileen Decker announced that the city’s police budget would not be increased as planned and $100 million to $150 million would be reallocated to “further enhance community neighborhood policing.” New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio said he would reallocate some of the NYPD’s $6 billion budget to youth and social services, reversing an April budget proposal that suggested cutting $400 million from the same programs. Five members also announced their intent to introduce a charter amendment for the November ballot of this year, which would propose the elimination of the Minneapolis Police Department to create “a new Charter Department to provide for community safety and violence.” A tedious process, according to local reporters, if it makes it to the ballot and is approved by voters, it would remove MPD from the city’s charter and the city could begin to dismantle it.