What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

A spike in violent crime has brought the issue into the 2021 elections — particularly in municipal campaigns like the Atlanta mayoral election, but also in the Virginia governor’s race. In Atlanta, former mayor Kasim Reed, whose previous administration was marred by corruption scandals, has made crime the centerpiece of his campaign, arguing that he’s the only candidate with the experience necessary to combat the surge. In Virginia, meanwhile, Youngkin has seized on crime as a way to attack McAuliffe. In ads, Youngkin has tried to tie the Democrat to efforts to defund police departments and close prisons, saying that the state would become less safe under McAuliffe’s watch.

Crime is a perennial but puzzling political topic. Politicians love to talk about crime on the campaign trail, but struggle to address it when they get into office. That’s largely because Americans have a lot of anxiety about crime, regardless of whether the crime rate is actually rising or falling. But even people who have devoted their lives to studying crime rates don’t really know why crime goes up or down.

Add to that the fact that the current crime spike is especially weird and hard to understand — what we’re seeing is really an uptick in homicides, while property crime has actually been on the decline — and it gets even more complicated to understand how voters will react. For instance, Democrats are often depicted by Republicans as softer on crime, but at this point it’s not clear if Democrats will suffer because of Americans’ worries about crime. The outcome of today’s elections could be a clue.

More than a year after the murder of George Floyd by members of the Minneapolis Police Department, Minneapolis voters have a chance to drastically alter city government at the ballot box today.

First, they will choose to reelect or oust Mayor Jacob Frey, who was criticized for not doing more to reform the police both before and after Floyd’s murder. Two progressives, community organizer Sheila Nezhad and former state Rep. Kate Knuth, are running against him in the ranked-choice election, and each has urged her supporters to rank the other second and “don’t rank Frey” to maximize the incumbent’s chances of losing.

Nezhad and Knuth are also strong supporters of City Question 2, a local ballot measure that would replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety that would focus more on social services and report to the City Council. However, another local ballot measure, City Question 1, would undermine that by giving the next mayor — be it Frey or one of his opponents — a lot more power vis-a-vis the council in the future.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the entire structure of city government, especially with regard to public safety, could change in Minneapolis today, along with the people who make up that government.

Police reform by city charter amendment is on the ballot in both Minneapolis and Cleveland. These proposals are very different from one another but have very similar goals — namely to make police officers more accountable to someone other than the police department itself.

The Cleveland amendment, Issue 24, would create a civilian-led police commission (required to broadly represent the “racial, social, economic, and cultural interests” of the city) that would have the power to direct investigations of officers and serve as the final word on whether disciplinary action against an officer is sufficient.

In Minneapolis, meanwhile, City Question 2 would shift the balance of power over law enforcement away from the police chief and mayor and toward the City Council, while also creating a new Department of Public Safety that would employ police officers as well as alternative safety responders, such as social workers and violence interrupters.

Both of these amendments are divisive, with the Minneapolis proposal frequently being framed as defunding or disbanding the police entirely, something it does not do. But supporters say the amendments are critical to changing the culture of policing in these Midwest cities, where the police departments in question have both been under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice in recent years.

Interestingly, another police-related ballot measure in Austin combines proposals that are frequently tied to reform — additional training hours and mandatory community engagement time — with a minimum police staffing requirement. Staffing requirements are issues that have been championed by police unions in the past, and the Minneapolis question would actually eliminate that city’s staffing minimums that have been in place since 1961.