nakedcapitalism | The Minneapolis City Council voted to disband the city’s police
department on June 26, a little more than a month after George Floyd
died after a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck for
almost nine minutes. Chauvin, along with three other officers who were
there when Floyd was killed, has since been fired from the force and is
now awaiting trial for Floyd’s death.
The city council vote does not automatically mean Minneapolis will no
longer have a police department, of course. After a series of steps,
the public will be asked to vote in November on an amendment regarding
whether or not this course of action is the right one.
In June, a competing vision of police reform had been on the table in Minneapolis. Just as community-led initiatives were gaining traction, Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo announced in June that his department would be using “real-time data” to overhaul its operations.
The work would be driven not by local grassroots groups, but instead
by a Chicago-based company called Benchmark Analytics. Chief Arradondo
announced on June 10 that the Minneapolis Police Department “would
contract with Benchmark Analytics to identify problematic behavior
early,” according to local NBC affiliate KARE 11.
Red flags flew up instantly, however, when this arrangement was made public.
For one thing, Benchmark Analytics is a private firm that promises to deliver an “all-in-one solution to advance police force management,” according to the company’s website, primarily through the use of algorithms that supposedly predict which officers may end up behaving “problematic[ally]” on the job.
For one thing, Benchmark Analytics is a private firm that promises to deliver an “all-in-one solution to advance police force management,” according to the company’s website, primarily through the use of algorithms that supposedly predict which officers may end up behaving “problematic[ally]” on the job.
This approach was at odds with the reallocation of resources from the
police department to social services that many community leaders in
Minneapolis and other cities are pushing for.
Another bone of contention involved funding, as it was reported that Benchmark Analytics’ reform model would be paid for by the Minneapolis Foundation, a philanthropic group led by a former mayor of the city, R.T. Rybak.
Another bone of contention involved funding, as it was reported that Benchmark Analytics’ reform model would be paid for by the Minneapolis Foundation, a philanthropic group led by a former mayor of the city, R.T. Rybak.
Activists, however, quickly seized upon the fact that not only did
the proposed contract with Benchmark Analytics appear to have
materialized without any public oversight, but Rybak himself is a
founding board member of the firm. This prompted the Racial Justice
Network to launch a petition criticizing “conflicts of interest” in the
Minneapolis Foundation’s involvement in police reform.
On June 25, Rybak announced that the Minneapolis Foundation “has
dropped its involvement.” A Minneapolis Police Department spokesman also
said that “the department is trying to find alternative funding” for
the Benchmark Analytics program; Mayor Jacob “Frey said if the city
doesn’t find other funders, it will see if the program can be done with
existing money.”
It seems unclear so far whether or not another funding source for Benchmark Analytics has been found. But in a July 14 interview with Minnesota Public Radio, while Mayor Frey did not mention Benchmark Analytics by name, he did tell radio host Cathy Wurzer that his plans for police reform will center on an “early intervention system that… uses evidence and data gathered by the University of Chicago.” (This description seems to align with the work of Benchmark Analytics, which is owned in part by the University of Chicago.)
Frey told Wurzer that the data gathered is intended to help the
Minneapolis Police Department “weed… bad apples out” by predicting
“which officers are more likely to have some sort of critical incident
in the future.”
The push to bring in Benchmark Analytics was not the first time
either Rybak or the Minneapolis Foundation has attempted to use power
and wealth to push privatization plans on city residents—even though
they often claim they are acting on behalf of marginalized people of
color.
For evidence of how this approach can fail the public, look no further than the Minneapolis Public Schools, where a similar cast of characters and strategies have already been used to shake up the district’s schools. These “reform” efforts took Minneapolis schools down a failed path, and they stand as a warning sign of how attempts to rehabilitate police forces, in Minneapolis and elsewhere, can be subject to the same sort of misguided thinking and exploitation by opportunists.
