Following the hue and cry over the brutal killing of an unarmed African-American man while in police custody, nine members of the Minneapolis City Council On June 7 pledged to dismantle the Minneapolis Police department and create a new system of public safety in Minneapolis.

In a statement read out to hundreds of protestors, the City Council President Lisa Bender said, ‘We are here because here in Minneapolis and in cities across the United States it is clear that our existing system of policing and public safety is not keeping our communities safe, our efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period.’

Lisa Bender added that she would try to shift police funding towards community-based strategies, however, details of the overhaul plan needs to discuss further.

Meanwhile, councilor Alondra Cano tweeted that the decision was taken through ‘a veto-proof majority’ in the council which agreed that the city police department was ‘not reformable’.

This decision comes in the light of the heart-rending murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer. A bystander video capturing the assault showed the officer’s knee pinned on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes while he pleaded for his life and called for his mother.

George’s death sparked riots and protest demonstrations across numerous states in the US.

However, this is not the first instance of police brutality in Minneapolis. As per a report by NDTV, last year, a black former Minneapolis police officer was sentenced to 12 years and six months in prison for the fatal shooting of an unarmed white Australian woman trying to report a crime.

Reacting to the announcement, Kandace Montgomery, the director of the Minnesota-based campaign group Black Vision was quoted saying ‘It shouldn’t have taken so much death to get us here. We’re safer without armed, unaccountable patrols supported by the state hunting black people.’

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