From 2008 to Post-George Floyd: Fiscal Justice Activism, Police Misconduct Payouts, and the Reconstruction of Minneapolis’s Self-Insurance Financial History

• In Event: Unpacking Police and Deadly Force

Abstract

In this paper, I build on investigative journalism probing the far-reaching extent of police misconduct-related payouts, research examining how US municipalities cover payouts, and legislative efforts seeking to systematically measure and account for both the financial and human price of police misconduct. I do so by reconstructing Minneapolis’s financial history regarding police misconduct payouts. I reconstruct the City’s financial history from 2008—when the City first started requiring the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) to pay an annual self-insurance premium into its Self-Insurance Fund—to this post-George Floyd moment. The goal of this paper is to illuminate how a self-insured city, like Minneapolis, covers police liability and to explain the interrelationship among four central funding sources and budgets: 1) the total City budget; 2) the City’s General Fund, which is the primary fund for running Minneapolis; 3) the City’s Self-Insurance Fund, which tracks the City’s tort liability program; and 4) the MPD annual budget. Data for this project is drawn from three main sources: 1) the archives of the longest standing Twin Cities-based police accountability organization; 2) publicly available online data; and 3) data acquired from data practice requests filed with the City. Implications are discussed and future research avenues proposed.

Author

• Stephen Wulff, University of Tennessee, Knoxville