Art Knight’s “number one priority” when he was appointed as deputy chief in 2017 was improving the force’s diversity, which he labeled “atrocious.” Despite modest increases in the nonwhite police numbers since Knight started his career there, the Minneapolis force still heavily over-polices black people, who are about nine times more likely than white people to be arrested for low-level offenses. If abolition becomes the order of the day, it will doubtless make all these efforts at internal reform look quaint, if not feeble. But whether abolitionist or reformist, all efforts to overhaul the MPD face one formidable foe: the extremely strong police union.
