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Facing resistance from council on MPD bonuses, Mayor Frey adds special meeting Friday

Mayor Frey's special meeting will be used to try and compel the city council to vote on a proposal for police recruitment and retention incentives.

MINNEAPOLIS — Mayor Jacob Frey has scheduled a special meeting for Friday afternoon to revisit the issue of police bonuses, after a majority of council members voted against placing the item on a budget committee agenda earlier this week.

The special meeting at 2 p.m. will force skeptical council members to take a vote on the bonuses, also known as "recruitment and retention incentives."

"We're tasked with making difficult decisions. I'm not saying this is an easy decision for every council member on the body," Frey said during a news conference on Wednesday. "I am saying that it is a necessary one to make."

The city's labor negotiators signed a deal with the police union earlier this month to offer $18,000 in bonuses over 2.5 years to existing officers ,and $15,000 to new recruits over the same time period, in exchange for granting Police Chief Brian O'Hara expanded power to fill empty shifts more quickly. Funding for the proposal would draw from one-time public safety aid passed earlier this year by the state legislature.  

O'Hara and Frey have described the bonuses as a strategy to keep more officers on the force, given that MPD has lost 40% of its officers over the past three and a half years.

"Police officers do need to get paid more," Frey said. "It's a very difficult job, an especially difficult job in Minneapolis right now, and we need to remain competitive in our city."

However, during Tuesday's budget committee meeting, several council members expressed strong opposition to the proposal, ranging from progressives like Ward 2's Robin Wonsley to the more moderate Emily Koski of Ward 11. Ultimately, the council voted 7-5 to keep the item off the agenda.

Koski, in particular, said she's not convinced that bonuses actually work to recruit and retain officers and that the council has not had enough time to properly consider the agreement. On Wednesday, one day after casting a vote in opposition to the item, she released a statement saying "the Mayor and administration still have not provided data or research to refute the concerns that were raised nor their comprehensive plan to increase staffing levels within the Minneapolis Police Department."

"I support our Police Department, I support our Police Department staff, I want our Police Department staff to receive a fair contract as a part of full negotiations with permanent pay raises, performance based bonuses, and incentives tied to actual motivators," Koski said. "Additionally, I am prepared to support investments in proven recruitment, hiring, and retention strategies for the Minneapolis Police Department. But, all the information available clearly and conclusively shows that sign-on and retention bonuses do not work for Police Departments across the nation, including here in the City of Minneapolis. We can't continue doing the same thing over and over again all the while expecting different results."

LaTrisha Vetaw, the Ward 4 Council Member in north Minneapolis, said she was "disappointed" by her colleagues' votes on Tuesday. She supports the city's agreement to provide bonuses and voted in favor of placing the item on the budget committee agenda. 

"As the chair of Public Health and Safety, I've been doing a lot of work over the last year to figure out what we can do as a city to get more officers on the force and also to retain the officers that we have," Vetaw said in an interview. "I represent a ward that wants more police. They want good police."

Vetaw said she hopes some of the council members change their minds before Friday's special meeting.

"I think [bonuses] can work. I don't think it's going to be the only thing that shifts it, but we have to try everything at this point," Vetaw said. "It's one of the most challenging jobs."

These kinds of bonuses are not uncommon. For example, several suburban Twin Cities agencies, such as Roseville have started using them lately to attract officers to the job.

"Absolutely, there are a lot of cities in Minnesota who have for a couple of years now been doing recruitment and retention bonuses," said Jeff Potts, the executive director of the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association. "Some of them are using this [state] public safety aid package to pay for those."

Nationally, large cities such as Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles have also approved a range of bonuses for police officers. 

"Is it going to ultimately attract enough people to fill the open positions in Minneapolis? We don't know yet," Potts said. "It has worked to a certain extent in other cities, and other major cities across the country, but it doesn't always work."

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