➡ During the George Floyd riots, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey gave up control of the city’s Third Precinct to avoid potential violence. Despite calls to defund the police, Frey supports deep structural reform instead, including the use of social workers in place of SWAT teams. However, this approach was criticized when a man was shot by his neighbor, despite numerous police reports, and social workers were sent to deescalate the situation instead of police. The shooter was eventually arrested after public outrage and a press conference by Frey and other officials.

During the George Floyd riots, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey abandoned the city’s Third Precinct, surrendering it to rioters who then set fire to it. The mayor defends, abandoning the Third Precinct. If we were to continue to attempt to hold the Third Precinct, very likely there would have been hand-to-hand combat, likely serious injury. After the George Floyd riots, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was in the spotlight to defund the police. The majority of Minneapolis’ city council is pledging to defund or dismantle the police department, following the death of George Floyd. However, the city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, opposes that. Go home, Jacob! Go home! Go home, Jacob! Go home, Jacob! Protesters chanted, go home, Jacob, over the weekend, after he said he does not support dismantling the department.

You campaigned on reform. That’s part of how you got elected. You have reformed the body-cam policy. You have banned warrior training. But we still have the George Floyd incident. Is reform enough? I don’t want to comment on precisely what the council meant by disbanding or ending the police force. I think there’s varying opinions. But what I’m saying is, look, I’m not for abolishing, but deep structural reform. Absolutely, we have to make it happen. To reform the police, they decided to replace SWAT teams with social workers. Governor Tim Walz gave it his stamp of approval while admitting they don’t have the staff to do it.

This idea of violence interveners and problem solvers or social workers pairing with police to respond to some mental health calls, many of those are domestic situations that escalate very quickly and turn violent. How realistic is it to have a social worker respond with a police officer in real time? I’m just curious, would it almost require a separate force of social workers and violence interveners to respond to these calls? And how would that work in practical? Here’s what I would tell you is when it comes to social workers, I’ve been talking about this forever.

I think we talk about Minnesota and I oftentimes point the rosy picture of where we rank on certain things. You’ve heard me say this as a teacher. We rank last on school counselors and social workers. So one of the things is of trying to find those people, trying to have them out there and trying to have them integrated into real life. Last week on Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024, Davis Matori was doing yard work outside his South Minneapolis home when his neighbor shot him. Surveillance video obtained by NBC Minneapolis affiliate Kara Levin shows the moment Matori fell to the ground.

His neighbor, John Sawchak, was then charged with second degree attempted murder, first degree assault and stalking and harassment because Matori has been reporting him to the police for over a year. According to court documents, Matori had called police on Sawchak 19 times in the last year, alleging his neighbor had threatened to kill him and his wife, brandished a knife at them and hurled racial slurs. Matori was told by a female police commander that her officers were frightened of Sawchak and she didn’t want to put them at risk. After shooting his neighbor, Sawchak was not arrested. They sent social workers and psychologists to try and deescalate the situation.

And after days of this, Frey and O’Hara had a press conference to complain about the public’s outrage. To that victim, I say, I am sorry that this happened to you. But it could not be anything further from the truth to say that we did nothing or that we just simply don’t care. That’s not true. Everything that we do is impacted by the reality that the police department is much smaller today than what it was prior to 2020. And we are dealing with a much higher call load. We cannot, as a community, on one hand, say, hey, we want cops to use less force.

We want less SWAT teams. We want more deescalation. And then when we actually do that, say, how come the cops didn’t use the SWAT team right away? We have been there 24 seven the last few days. We have been using our behavioral threat assessment team. We have used a psychiatrist. We have spoken to this individual’s family. We have made dozens of attempts to attempt to contact this person. But again, to say that we simply don’t care or we did nothing is simply not true. This feels a whole lot more like politics than it does like somebody that’s trying to find a solution or about trying to find a solution right now.

Again, less politics. That kind of thing is gross. Hours after this press conference, Sawchak was finally arrested and taken into custody. If you’re saying you’re scared, what does that do to me? You know, reporting for InfoWars, this is Greg Reese. [tr:trw].