Frey signs Minneapolis city budget with police funding cuts
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey signed a $1.5 billion city budget on Friday that preserves his proposed police staffing levels.
It also takes nearly $8 million from the Minneapolis Police Department to pay for crime prevention programs, mental health crisis response teams and other initiatives.
“This budget centered an approach to public safety by better integrating social services into our emergency response systems while fully preserving the targeted officer staffing levels in our Police Department,” Frey wrote in a statement Friday.
Frey had threatened to veto an earlier version of the budget that would have reduced the Police Department’s potential staffing level from 888 to 750 officers by 2022. But the City Council eventually allowed the department to keep that higher level.
The budget includes a property tax levy increase of 5.75 percent and includes cuts to all the city's largest departments.
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