SANITY PREVAILS IN MINNEAPOLIS

    Minneapolis voters on Tuesday rejected a progressive plan to do away with the city’s police department and to replace it with a vaguely defined “Department of Public Safety,” which would not have been required to employ any actual police officers.
     The charter amendment failed, with about 56 percent of voters rejecting the proposal in preliminary results Tuesday night. It is the most direct referendum yet on the Left’s post-George Floyd anti-police message.  

      City Question 2 asked voters if they wished to replace the city’s police department with a public safety department that would employ “a comprehensive public health approach.” The department would not have been required to employ police officers, but it could have employed them “if necessary, to fulfill its responsibilities for public safety,” according to the ballot language. The amendment would have gotten rid of the funding formula to determine a minimum number of officers in the city, and it would have removed the police chief’s job from the city charter. The new department would have been headed instead by a civilian commissioner reporting not only to the mayor, but to the 13-member city council.