The Minneapolis City Council is moving forward with a proposed amendment to the city’s charter that would disband the current police department and replace it with a Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention. Voters will ultimately decide the fate of the council’s proposal in November if it passes some bureaucratic hurdles in meantime. This week on Dialogue Minnesota, University of Minnesota Associate Professor of Sociology Michelle Phelps discusses systemic racism in our nation’s police departments and what a new vision for law enforcement might look like.

Memory could have a stronger hold on our current circumstances than we think. Professor Alejandro Baer of the Department of Sociology and the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies explores the human ability to overcome conflict through public remembrance.

Despite following the Obama-era playbook for police reform, Minneapolis has yet to rebuild trust between community members and the police. Professor Michelle Phelps is quoted in this Star Tribune article.

“With our longer life spans, many people live as many years in retirement as they did working,” said Phyllis Moen, who holds an endowed chair in sociology at the University of Minnesota. “With this longevity bonus and years of active engagement, they’ve rewritten the script. Now there’s a sense of loss as they recognize their choices and opportunities are changing.”