Minneapolis police suffer from historically low staffing shortage: ‘not sustainable’

The Minneapolis Police Department is suffering from a historically low staffing shortage as it deals with the lowest level of uniformed personnel in four decades, according to the Star Tribune.

The city department has just 585 sworn officers and, of 22 cities, it has the lowest ratio of officers to population, the Tribune reported.

The Minneapolis Police Department has also relied on other law enforcement partners as well as civilian analysts to help with some of its work.

In recent years, Minneapolis has experienced the worst shortage of police personnel in the United States.

“It’s absolutely not sustainable,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told the outlet. “Thank God for all these other agencies filling this gap. »

The MPD is also too weak in terms of police officers to restart their “community engagement unit,” which is seen as a way to build trust between police and the community.

“It’s unfortunate, but that’s what goes away first,” O’Hara told the outlet. “We will never change people’s perceptions of us – and we will never build meaningful relationships with people – if all we do is respond from one emergency to the next. »

Some days, just four officers are tasked with patrolling large areas of the city, the Tribune reported.

Minneapolis voters rejected a measure in 2021 that would have replaced MPD with a Department of Public Safety, which came up for a vote after the death of George Floyd in 2020.

The Justice Department announced in June that a police investigation after Floyd’s death found evidence of excessive use of force and racial discrimination.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time that there was “reasonable cause to believe that MPD and the City of Minneapolis engaged in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution of the United States.”