Brooklyn Center Passes New Policing Plan For 2022
BROOKLYN CENTER, Minn. (WCCO) -- The Brooklyn Center City Council unanimously passed its 2022 budget Monday night, which includes a plan for alternative public safety programs.
The city was where former police officer Kim Potter fatally shot Daunte Wright earlier this year. She is now on trial on manslaughter charges.
The 2022 budget will leave open three police officer vacancies, along with some other funding from other places, to pay for the public safety initiative named after Wright. Some of the money will come from an increase in the city's lodging tax.
The budget resolution allocates $1.07 million in total to the resolution.
The plan was not passed without some measure of controversy. Earlier in the evening, Wright's mother asked to have her son's named left off the measure unless it was passed in full. The resolution is also named after Kobe Dimock-Heisler, who was fatally shot by police responding to a domestic assault call in August 2019.
Also, the Star Tribune reports that Mayor Mike Elliott, who has spoken out in the past about not wishing to see the police department defunded, called City Manager Reggie Edwards' actions for budgeting a coordinator "subversive."
"Today, we took another step forward towards realizing the public safety resolution that our city passed earlier this year. But this is only the beginning," Elliot said in a press release Tuesday morning. "Our budget is a moral document and how we spend public funds should be aligned with our vision and our values. And our community has made it clear that we want and need a system of public safety where police are not our only response for everything. Though passing this budget resolution is a start, it is not enough. In order to fully implement and realize what we laid out in the public safety resolution, we need to fully fund all pieces of it. I will continue fighting for and with our community until we have all the resources we need to implement our vision."