MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Yesterday, we took a drive over the Mississippi River to Minneapolis to visit City Hall and Mayor Jacob Frey. I asked what he thinks has changed in the five years since George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer.
JACOB FREY: Right now, we are very focused on not just getting back to the old normal but blowing by the old normal and seeing true transformation in our city. George Floyd's murder was a hundred-years-in-the-making reckoning around racial justice, and in Minneapolis, of course, we felt it very acutely. We recognize and we own that we are the city where George Floyd was murdered, and we're also the city that's going to get this right. We're going to be the example for so many others to follow in the way that we do police reform. And by the way, we're making huge strides. And we're going to do everything possible to make sure that the precision of our solutions now match the precision of the harm that was initially inflicted.
MARTIN: When you first ran for mayor back in - I guess it would've been 2017, improving relationships between the community and the police was one of your signature issues. How do you think that's going, and what measure or what metric do you use to assess that?
FREY: We're making real progress.
MARTIN: How do you assess that?
FREY: Well, we don't assess it directly. We have an independent evaluator that assesses it. Of course, we've got our own internal audits. But look, you don't need to take my word for it. Look at what the independent evaluator said - that we have made greater strides over these years than any other city in the country under a consent decree.
MARTIN: The - you mentioned the consent decree. The Department of Justice announced that it wants to withdraw from the consent decree. And the current police chief, Brian O'Hara, said that he - basically, what you both said is - all city leadership said you're going to do this anyway.
FREY: That's right.
MARTIN: The question I have is, doesn't that send a mixed message? And if it does, how do you reinforce the message that you want to send?
FREY: The message that we are sending - every one of us are sending - is consistent, which is we're doing this anyway. The Trump administration - they can go in whatever direction they want. We are doing this work anyway. Whether or not the White House cares about police reform, we do here in the city of Minneapolis. And every single sentence of every single paragraph of that 169-page agreement, we're going to work towards compliance with. People have been demanding change for years, and we're not backing away from this agreement simply because Donald Trump is backing away himself.
MARTIN: There are people who still argue that the change is taking too long - for example, implementing public safety measures that don't rely solely on policing to respond to sort of different situations. I mean, this is a situation that we see, like, all over...
FREY: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...The country, really, in lots of places where people are having, say, a mental health crisis or, you know, utilizing other methods, like, you know, violence interrupters. I mean, the argument is that these initiatives are just taking too long to get up and running. What do you say to that?
FREY: In Minneapolis, we've set those initiatives up. We haven't just talked about having mental health responders. We have them available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Five years ago, we talked about wanting to have a response that didn't just involve an officer with a gun. Sometimes it's a mental health responder. And like I said, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we now have a mental health response when we call 911. And I'll just be real with you. It's not easy to build out because what are the metrics that you use to track how they're doing? What specifically are they responding to, and how do they do so safely? Because you can't just send anybody into a circumstance that might be dangerous or violent. This is the stuff that we're working...
MARTIN: Is it harder than you thought it was going to be?
FREY: I don't know that we entirely knew what to expect 'cause it was brand new. And anytime you do something that is brand new, I think it's important for people to be honest. We got to be honest about where it's working. We got to be honest about where it's not. And then you make changes to make sure you're doing everything possible to have a successful program.
MARTIN: What do you think is the biggest takeaway from your experience these past few years? If you were to speak to your fellow city leaders around the country, what would you say?
FREY: First off, none of the work is easy. It's about changing culture and changing systems. It's a hundred years' worth of culture that's baked into the walls of City Hall that is hard to shift. Anybody who hasn't learned a few lessons in 2020 is probably not doing the necessary self-reflection.
MARTIN: How do you want the events of May of 2020 to be remembered?
FREY: We need to move forward. We shouldn't move on in the sense that we're forgetting what happened. You got to remember it. You got to acknowledge it. And you got to work like crazy to bend, intentionally, that arc of justice. And we got a whole lot of people that are working collectively to bend it.
MARTIN: Mayor Jacob Frey, thank you so much for talking with us.
FREY: Thank you so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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