Since the 2020 murder of George Floyd, the Minneapolis Police Department has struggled to retain and recruit staff. Now, city leaders are trying to improve other avenues to support the police department. 

The Minneapolis City Council Public Health and Safety Committee met on July 24 to discuss the Center for Justice Research and Innovation recommendations to the MPD, especially concerning staffing and non-police response implementations. 

The committee’s recommendations cover multiple aspects of MPD including staffing and police operations. The staffing recommendations include implementing non-police response operations and reconsidering officer time spent responding to calls.

As of July 2024, the MPD has 568 staff officers but is budgeted for 713 staff officers, according to data provided by MPD Spokesperson Garrett Parten. 

MPD recruits at college career fairs in and out of Minnesota, Community Service Officer program events, local high schools and diversity-focused events, according to Parten. Recently, the department has used social media advertising and QR codes on police cars to increase recruitment exposure. 

Council Member Robin Wonsley (Ward 2) said in a statement that her office is dedicated to identifying what changes were successfully made to the MPD, especially in areas of misconduct, discipline and coaching. Wonsley authored a legislative directive earlier this year asking for updates about recommendations from the committee’s study to the MPD. 

During the committee’s meeting in July, Wonsley spearheaded questions regarding MPD’s work with the Behavioral Crisis Response (BCR) team in the face of a short-staffed department. 

Police Chief Brian O’Hara said the Department needs the BCR’s support, but they need more resources so officers are not responding to mental health crisis calls. 

“It’s very much needed. It’s very helpful,” O’Hara said in the meeting. “I do know there are still times when there is not a BCR unit available and police duty answer calls because they’re busy with other calls and that type of thing.”

Director of 911 Joni Hodne said the BCR is spread thin and needs more people to respond to calls. Hodne added the BCR and police sometimes respond to calls together in instances where the situation is expected to be violent or involve weapons. 

“We do have calls that the police will go out there,” Hodne said. “They’ll get the safety situation under control. Then, they can call a BCR to come in and handle any type of behavioral crisis that anybody is having unseen, and that does happen frequently. They do work together.”

Council President Elliot Payne (Ward 1) said in the meeting that the city and MPD need to consider the context of BCR social worker interventions, which are not necessarily a policing concern but a mental health concern when reporting data to the public. 

University of Minnesota Sociology Professor Michelle Phelps said it is unsurprising that MPD has not filled their vacant spots because the department is not retaining officers like usual. Phelps said the consent decrees by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights and by the U.S. Justice Department created a tense environment for MPD to hire. 

“For several years, the situation in Minneapolis has been really complicated and tense,” Phelps said. “It is a city in which there is conflicted and ambivalent support for the police, and there’s a lot of trauma about the police officers’ actions, including the murder of George Floyd.” 

Phelps said rather than solely focusing on MPD’s staffing struggles, she hopes city leaders continue to consider other avenues for public safety, such as violence interruption personnel or the BCR. 

“Police don’t always equate with public safety,” Phelps said. “We can see that both in the sense of police sometimes create danger and create a public safety risk. We can also see that in that there are lots of other ways to be safe that don’t involve calling the police.”

Wonsley said in the statement that, despite the City Council’s allocation of $7 million for hard-to-fill positions, MPD struggles to recruit and retain workers because they failed to show that misconduct is not tolerated. 

“Potential new officers do not have any reason to believe that they will not be training under another Derek Chauvin,” Wonsley said in the statement. “This is why neighboring police forces such as those in St. Paul and surrounding suburbs are not struggling with recruitment and retention, although they pay less than MPD.”

Phelps said recruitment is struggling because many are not seeing the promised transformative changes to MPD. Phelps added the lack of transparency about police misconduct and discipline might make it more difficult to hold officers accountable. 

“The new contract, it actually codifies the sort of rules around coaching, not being a discipline,” Phelps said. “It arguably makes it harder for the people who are calling for those coaching records to be publicly available and scrutinized.”

Phelps said with the latest police contract, new provisions aim to create some flexibility with staffing, and hiring civilian investigators could help recruitment in the future. Though the 21.7% pay raise over the next three years is the big ticket item to help staffing, she questions if the staffing trouble is money-related. 

O’Hara said as the officer’s time demands change due to settlement agreements, at least one-third of the officer’s time should be dedicated to community engagement such as attending neighborhood meetings. This time dedication may become more difficult as training requirements for officers change. 

“I want the goal to be specifically, in addition to training, everything else we’re doing, we are requiring people to do committee engagement as part of their regular duties,” O’Hara said in the meeting.

Corrections: A previous version of this article misquoted Michelle Phelps in reference to the city of Minneapolis’ support of police. She called it ambivalent, not abhorrent.