MPD budget 2020
We pay for this, and the Minneapolis Police Department is our entire public safety budget.
Thoughts.
A few things do stand out. A vast majority of our public safety dollars are invested in law enforcement. So, there is little to no money in this budget allocated to the other parts of crime reduction; prevention, intervention and restoration.
I think we all can admit, we kinda expect police to do those things too, but that is not their design. They are only designed to do law enforcement. They are designed as a hammer and to treat everything like a nail.
Dollar$
The total Minneapolis Police Department’s budget increased from $184.9 million to $193.3 million from 2019 to 2020. This is an increase of $8.3 million, or 4.5%. The Police Department’s 2020 expenditure budget reflects inflation in operating costs and new budgetary change items.
Revenues were projected to decrease by 11.7% in this department due to decreases in Police Special Revenue Fund, along with Federal and State grants. The department’s total revenues in 2020 were projected to be $13.8 million.
(BEFORE COVID-19 EMERGENCY BUDGETING)
Minneapolis Council Member Cam Gordon when MPD asked for an increase of 400 officers this time last year.
“Here’s the obvious concern: 400 new police officers will cost a lot of money. The numbers I’ve seen have ranged from $45M-$60M per year. This is just for the personnel costs and does not reflect all of the upgrades we would have to make to infrastructure like buildings and vehicles to accommodate such a large increase in police. One way to look at this is that it’s an increase of at least 25% over current funding levels, if not quite a bit more.
It is very clear that crime has not increased 25%. My office has looked through MPD’s crime statistics and found that crime is significantly down from a decade ago, across the board. Violent crime is down 18%, property crime down 19%, Part I crime is down 19%, Part II crime is down an impressive 43%.
When you factor in the growth of the city, these results get more pronounced, not less. Per capita violent crime fell by 25% over the last decade, property and Part I crime both fell by 27%, Part II crime fell by 49%. So growth in population is not, in itself, driving more crime, nor in itself a reason for more police. A person living in Minneapolis was significantly less likely to be a victim of a crime last year than in 2008. These are numbers to celebrate, not alarms sounding about the need for more police officers.”
“We have 3 to 6 percent of cops who shouldn’t be cops,” he said. “I’ll be the first one to say that. We have some members on this department that shouldn’t be here. But the vast majority of them should be here.”
— Minneapolis Police Deputy Chief Arthur Knight.
And, incidentally we did not reduce the MPD force by 3-6% after this admission.