On July 18th, 2024 the Minneapolis City Council voted 8 to 4 in favor of a massive 21% pay increase for the Minneapolis Police Department. Council Member Jamal Osman missed the vote but said he would have also voted in favor. Despite calls by critics, the contract does not reform the police except to grant greater powers to the Chief Brian O’Hara which expire in a few years. The minimum base pay for Minneapolis police officers now will surge to $90,000 and will grow again to just under $100,000 in the next three years making them some of the highest paid public employees in the state. In practice, almost three-quarters of Minneapolis police already earn six figure incomes via overtime and additional private security jobs where they use MPD uniforms and vehicles. By contrast, this means a brand new, inexperienced cop will earn on average 50% more than a new Minneapolis teacher and 250% more than the average park board employee. The median income in Minneapolis in 2022 was just under $42,000, but the top paid employee of the police department earned $390,000. This is a grotesque subsidy from the taxpayers of Minneapolis to the largely suburban residing police staff.
Hopefully this puts to bed a longstanding lie about Minneapolis: the police were never defunded or reformed. In 2025, the city will spend just under $220 million on policing from its general fund; a 20% increase from 2019. While funding has surged, staffing has plummeted. The police department is the smallest it has been in quite some time with just around 400 officers. The mayor’s office argues that this massive pay increase will attract new applications and new recruits to fill out the police department to the City Charter minimum of 700 some officers. All evidence from around the country indicates this will not happen. Cities all over have lost police officers who seek the political protection of small towns and Republican states. Even though no reforms have been put on police at either the city or state level in the four years since George Floyd’s murder, mere public criticism of cops has led them to go where they face no consequences at all. This contract’s higher base pay won’t recruit more police; it will just line the pockets of the officers who have stayed thus far.
Residents of Minneapolis should harbor no hope that higher police pay will reduce crime. Frankly, the level of funding and staffing at the police department has had no bearing on the rate at which crimes are committed, investigated, or prosecuted. This relationship holds true for the country as a whole. Generally, and especially in Minneapolis, police are quite bad at preventing or solving crime. Minneapolis police clearance rates (the percentage of reported crimes brought to charge) plummeted to just 38% by 2020 when the department had almost twice as many officers. So even if the department doubled its size due to this contract, we shouldn’t expect cops to be solving more crimes. The police have little bearing on how many crimes are committed either. The murder rate in Minneapolis fell by 10% in 2022. Auto thefts are down 29% this year. These changes in levels of crime have no relation to how many cops there are or how much funding they received. If anything, crime surged in 2020 and 2021 when the police department had hundreds of more officers and the active support of the national guard. Crime has dropped now that the department is down to a few hundred officers. The police do nothing to address the causes or incidence of crime. Policing is an expensive and ineffective system of public safety.
Entire books can (and hopefully will) be written about the incompetence of Mayor Jacob Frey. His initial 2017 campaign for mayor was built on two pillars: ending homelessness in five years and reforming the police department. He criticized Mayor Betsy Hodges for failing to reform the police because both are solely under the prerogative of the mayor’s office. In the last 7 years, Minneapolis has not solved either issue despite Frey winning even more centralized power via a charter amendment. Instead the city’s name is globally synonymous with racialized murder and police brutality. Undeterred, Frey has become an unwavering booster of the police. Every year he asks for more police spending while he starves alternative public safety programs; Frey attacks other elected democrats like City Councillor Robin Wonsely and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty who seek even moderate reforms or alternative interventions to address crime. At just a fiduciary level, Minneapolis residents should be outraged that the mayor has spent the last ten months negotiating with the police union only to grant them a 21% raise not reflective of their current work quality or tied to future performance benchmarks. In what other career in the world could you only succeed 38% of the time and still get a 21% raise with no strings attached? Compare how Frey negotiated with the police with the recent fights for city park employees and public school teachers. Democrats in other elected positions fight hard against unions to keep government wages low while Frey gives the police union whatever it wants.
In return for Frey’s unconditional political cover and funding support, the police of Minneapolis hate his guts and criticize the city at every opportunity. The Police Officers Federation of Minnesota (the department’s union) has all but stopped endorsing Democrats and turned to Republicans who oppose collective bargaining for everyone except cops. Current and former union leaders publicly campaign for Donald Trump who wanted to use the military to murder Minneapolis residents. Cops who refuse to talk to local journalists go on Fox News to give the far-right ugly talking points about our city. Cops can often be found lounging around in parked cars rather than patrolling their beats. When residents approach cops hanging out on the job to ask them to address a problem, the cops reply that they are under orders from the mayor’s office to take a “hands off” approach to crime. Befuddled residents then do all they can to deal with the issues themselves.
If the contract will have any effect, it will be on the budgets of neighboring cities in the metro area. Every nearby police department is going to demand a similar increase in their base pay by threatening that they will lose prospective hires to Minneapolis. In effect, Minneapolis’ new contract is an unfunded mandate on the metro area to jack up their police spending. Unfortunately, the city council hasn’t thought through these issues. In fact the Minneapolis city Council Isnt even sure how it will pay for this contract. Right now it is fighting with the mayor because no one can figure out where the millions of dollars needed for the new contract will come from. No matter what short-term funding source, in the long-run, the people of Minneapolis will be on the hook for higher taxes and cuts to other public services all to pay six-figure incomes to cops who don’t solve crime and don’t particularly like this city or the people who live here.
This is a disappointing turn of events. Most members of the City Council won their election in 2023 by promising to meaningfully reform the police department and challenge the way Mayor Frey has run the city. Despite these vows, councilors Elliot Payne, Katie Cashman, and Aurin Chowdury voted for this blank check to the police citing procedural or technical concerns about renegotiating.
Creating new forms of public safety and responsible approaches to police reform would have been hard. The police would have campaigned against any reform using the same lies and fear tactics they’ve used for the last four years. Business leaders would have threatened to leave the city if cops were not here to protect their investments. Frey certainly would have used every trick in the book to support the police. Creating and enacting real public safety reforms would have required creativity, cunning, and bravery on the part of our city council. Unfortunately, a majority of them just proved they have none of these qualities; they only have rubber stamps.
By Ethan BF