Judge Orders Minneapolis to Hire More Officers After ‘Defund the Police’ Debacle

A judge ruled in favor of conservatives Thursday, saying Minneapolis needs to hire more police officers to help fight rising crime.

Fox News reported, “‘Minneapolis is in a crisis,’ the eight plaintiffs connected to the conservative Upper Midwest Law Center wrote in their complaint, citing the rise in shootings and homicides and the violent George Floyd protests, FOX 9 in Minneapolis reported.”

Residents Don and Sondra Samuels said the rise in crime is what pushed them and six others to sue the city and Mayor Jacob Frey for not protecting the area. Former City Council member, Don, 72, said he and his wife watched the chaos with increasing concern after George Floyd’s death.

“We were pretty frightened and disturbed by the disrespect of the police and the institution of policing,” Don told the Daily Mail.

“We know there are problems for sure, but when they burned down the Third Precinct, for us a new watermark had been reached and it was putting our safety at risk,” he added.

Hennepin County District Judge Jamie L. Anderson said the city needs to have at least 730 officers by June 30, 2022, or .2% of the population after the 2020 Census is published, according to the station. 

The city already approved $6.4 million in funding in February to hire more officers. The department said it only had 638 officers available to work at the time, which was 200 fewer than usual. The budget increase and the judge’s order came after the city council voted to slash $8 million from the budget in December. 

In June 2020, the city council unanimously approved a pledge to abolish the police department and replace it “with a so-called community-led public safety system amid a pressure campaign spearheaded by Black Lives Matter activists and far-left Democrats to defund law enforcement in the wake of protests and riots over George Floyd’s death,” according to Breitbart News coverage.

Since then, Minneapolis police officers have left the force in droves, “with many filing post-traumatic stress claims due to the civil unrest that followed,” Fox News reported.

Crime has also increased dramatically in the city. In the past year, gunshot victims were up 90 percent, and  “the number of homicides in Minneapolis jumped from 48 in 2019 to 84 in 2020 — one of the deadliest years on record, according to the Star-Tribune. The publication further reported that 2021 is on pace to exceed 2020’s total.

“We have made the emotional appeal,” Don Samuels said, according to FOX 9. “We have demonstrated the statistical uptick and now this is the legal action we are exercising because it seems as if the city council cannot hear us and doesn’t feel what we feel.”

The case is Spann, et al. v. Minneapolis City Council and Mayor Jacob Frey, No. 27-cv-20-10558 in the Hennepin County District Court.