Minneapolis mayor booed by protesters after refusing to defund and abolish police

His website says he has strengthened the police department’s body-worn camera policy but did not give further specifics on steps taken by the mayor to improve relations between officers and the community.

Frey told WCCO that he supports “massive structural reform” to revise a racist system and addressing “inherent inequities.”

Call for defunding and a history of discrimination

A civil suit was filed by the officers based on “their own experiences on the force from when they were recruits training through their present statuses at the time in ’07,” attorney John Klassen, who represented the officers, told CNN.

The officers experienced their own individual “employment discrimination” while also “watching the every day, every week, every year actions of white officers against citizens of color. Which they had to stand and watch and read about and hear about and see no action, effective action, taken against those officers for what they firmly believed were constitutional violations and discrimination in the police of Minneapolis to citizens,” Klassen said.

There was no corrective action or admission of liability when the case was dismissed out of court with a settlement of more than $800,000, but Klassen said transitions to the new leadership in the department including Chief Arradondo, and the “change in the mayoral leadership of the city has led to what appears to be an increase in recruiting of minority officers.”

“I did not need days or weeks or months or processes or bureaucracies to tell me what occurred out here last Monday was wrong,” he added.

He said he held the four officers involved in the death of Floyd fully accountable and removed them from their duties, calling their actions a “violation of humanity.”