Every night, Don Samuels hears gunshots from his North Minneapolis home. And not just a single shot here and there like he and his wife used to hear in years past.

"You hear repeat fire — pop, pop, pop, pop, pop — sequential shots," Samuels said.

A neighbor across the street recently had her car shot up while a baby was in the back seat, Samuels said. She moved away. Bullets pierced the home of another neighbor. She moved after her child had a mental-health breakdown. One neighbor installed a bulletproof headboard on her bed to protect herself from bullets flying in the night, Samuels said. Earlier this year, a nine-year-old girl was shot and killed near Samuels's home.

Violent crime has been soaring in Minneapolis since the fiery riots and unrest after George Floyd's killing in this city in May 2020. No community has felt the rise in lawlessness more sharply than the Jordan neighborhood, where Samuels lives.

A car in North Minneapolis was shot with a baby in the back seat.

Criminals have been emboldened by a diminished and overworked police force that's lost about a quarter of its officers since Floyd's murder. Those officers were driven away, in part, by anti-cop rhetoric from progressive city leaders. To Samuels, a former city councilman and one-time candidate for mayor, Minneapolis needs better cops, and more fair and just cops. What it certainly does not need, in his estimation, is fewer cops.

But fewer cops is what Minneapolis may have if voters approve a charter amendment in November to get rid of the city's police department and replace it with a vaguely defined public-safety department, the latest play by many of the same people behind last summer's "defund the police" movement.

The new department would employ "a comprehensive public-health approach" and could include police officers "if necessary, to fulfill its responsibilities for public safety," according to the ballot language. The amendment would get rid of the funding formula to determine a minimum number of officers in the city, and it would remove the police chief's job from the city charter. The new department would be headed instead by a civilian commissioner reporting not only to the mayor, but to the 13-member city council, creating what one opponent called "the 14 bosses problem."

The confusing nature of the initiative — not even proponents know exactly how the proposed public-safety department will operate, if it will ultimately employ police officers, and if so, how many? — along with misleading ballot language, led to months of court challenges. But the Minnesota Supreme Court okayed the final ballot language in mid September, ensuring that Minneapolis will be the first major city in post-Floyd America to put a proposed overhaul of its police department before voters.

The effort has divided Democrats in Minnesota and elsewhere. Progressives such as U.S. representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison support it, while the state's Democratic governor, Tim Walz, and U.S. senator Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) are opposed.

After last year's elections, moderate Democrats blamed progressive calls to "defund the police" for their underperformance in House races across the country, and they groused that they'd been unfairly tagged as anti-police. If residents of Minneapolis, an overwhelmingly Democratic city, do, in fact, vote away their police department in November, it will be even harder for Democrats to shake the voter impression that theirs is the party of defund-the-police radicals.

Samuels is a leading opponent of the ballot measure in Minneapolis, though he is not an opponent of police reform generally. "I think it is, in fact, crucial and urgent," he said. In the wake of Floyd's killing, he believes the stars are aligned for significant reform. Public sympathy is on their side, he said, and the department has a popular black police chief. But he worries that the opportunity for reform will be "squandered by the ballot measure."

He worries that if the measure passes, there will be a "tinkering" by activists and city leaders of what an officer is and does in Minneapolis, and he worries there won't be enough of them.

"That fear is justified," he said, "not in some kind of 'Oh, the language isn't clear,' but the fact that there's so much comfort . . . with the low levels of police, with actually reducing the funding of police, and that sort of apathetic, cavalier response to the incredible crime wave that we're experiencing, especially in my neighborhood."

The activists behind the measure insist the current police department is irretrievably broken.

"Our current public safety model is not designed to keep us safe — certainly not those of us from immigrant communities or Black Minnesotans," state senator Omar Fateh, a Democratic socialist and a supporter of the ballot initiative, wrote recently in the Star Tribune.

The activists accuse their opponents of resorting to fear tactics, and "race/place based division." If the measure passes, they say, there will still likely be armed police officers in Minneapolis, at least in the short term (though some still advocate for the complete elimination of police officers from city streets). But, according to their vision for the new public-safety department, there also will be social workers, health-care workers, violence-interruption program leaders, and professionals trained to deal with homelessness, addiction, and mental-health crises at the ready.

That may sound reassuring, but as opponents of the measure note, there's no actual plan behind it: no plan for how many social workers or police officers will be employed, how unarmed social workers will be deployed into heated and potentially dangerous situations, what will happen if a seemingly calm situation turns violent or deadly, and how all of the activists' lofty ambitions will be funded. Those details are for later.

Steve Cramer, CEO of the Minneapolis Downtown Council and an opponent of the ballot initiative, said there already are programs in the city that use social workers, crime-prevention specialists, and outreach workers specializing in homelessness and addiction.

"It's happening now. It can and should happen more," he told National Review. "Changing our charter is not in any way, shape, or form a prerequisite for moving further in that direction."

There's also not a lot of trust that the people behind Yes 4 Minneapolis, the coalition pushing the ballot initiative, are interested in improving policing at all.

The coalition is composed of a who's who of liberal and leftist groups, more than 50 in all — racial-justice and black-liberation organizations, labor unions, advocates for sex workers and the homeless, the American Civil Liberties Union, a young Democrats group, along with the Socialist Party of Minnesota and the Twin Cities Democratic Socialists.

Before becoming board chairwoman of Yes 4 Minneapolis, Kandace Montgomery was the director of Black Visions Collective, one of the leading groups calling for defunding and abolishing the police department. In a 2020 interview with the Intercept, she painted a picture of what she believes a world without police would look like:

A world without police would look like safety that is controlled and is led by our community, that focuses on transformation and transformative justice. A world without police means that everybody has what they need to survive and what they need to live healthy lives. It means we have the money that we need for education, health care, housing, workers' rights. It is a total transformation away from a racist and violent system into one that truly fosters our safety and well-being.

Cramer worries that under Montgomery's model, the police department that exists now "will continue to be intentionally withered on the vine."

A recent poll of Minneapolis voters conducted by local and national media outlets found that most residents don't want that, either. According to the September poll, 55 percent of respondents don't think Minneapolis should reduce the size of its police force. In fact, there was majority support for that question among every group — male/female, white/black, college degree/ no college degree, Democrat/Republican/Independent — except one, young voters between 18 and 34. And even among that cohort, more respondents (42 percent) supported maintaining the size of the department than opposed it (36 percent).

The poll did find that a majority of residents (53 percent) have an unfavorable view of the police department, with higher numbers among young voters, black voters, women, Democrats, and people without college degrees.

It also found that more voters (49 percent) support the ballot initiative to replace the police department with a public-safety department than oppose it (41 percent). That support is driven by white voters (51 percent) and young voters (57 percent among voters 18 to 34). More black voters (47 percent) oppose eliminating the police department than support it (42 percent).

John Phelan, an economist who tracks crime at the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative Minnesota think tank, said it's not surprising that black voters would be less inclined to get rid of the police department, considering that blacks have disproportionately been victims amid the current crime wave.

"Black residents in Minneapolis are well aware of what happens, because they're the people who suffer for this," Phelan said. "Everybody in the world can name George Floyd. But nobody can name the six-year-old girl who was shot in the head and died, Aniya Allen. Nobody can name the (nine-year-old) girl who was shot dead while jumping on the trampoline in her front garden in North Minneapolis. Nobody cares about these people. These are black lives that don't matter. Black lives only matter when it's the police who take them."

He said if the measure were to pass, there's little reason to believe the progressive city council would increase policing levels in Minneapolis.

"If the police levels change," he said, "the only way they're going to go is down."

Cramer agrees that the activists pushing to end the police department are so focused on police abuses that they're discounting the real crime problem in the Minneapolis. "Why aren't we talking about the 70-plus people, most of whom are black or brown, who have been killed, not by police, but in our community. And that's just not something you hear from Yes 4 Minneapolis at all," Cramer said.

People inside and outside of Minneapolis are watching to see what Minneapolis does, he said.

"I can absolutely tell you there are investment decisions that are on hold about future housing projects," Cramer said. "There are leasing decisions that are on hold until this election, the outcome is known and people can kind of sort out what it's going to mean for Minneapolis going forward."

Samuels said he's been attacked online and received racist messages for opposing the defund movement and the ballot initiative. "This is a radical movement that intimidates," he said.

While he's steadfast in his belief that the cop culture needs to change, he's just as sure that police are, and will continue to be, necessary in Minneapolis.

"If they weren't necessary, we would have gotten rid of them a long time ago," he said. "But we need them."