Minnesota’s largest bail fund became famous in 2020. Now it’s changing direction
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When George Floyd was killed in May 2020 under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, local organization Minnesota Freedom Fund had just one full-time employee.
Then the donations poured in. Twenty million over four days. Forty million by the end of 2020.
The Minnesota Freedom Fund is a bail fund, focused on paying the bail of people jailed ahead of trial. But last week, the organization announced a change in course. By the end of this month, it will no longer be directly paying bail.
Elizer Darris is executive director of the Minnesota Freedom Fund. He spoke with MPR News host Emily Bright about the future of the organization.
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The Minnesota Freedom Fund was founded in 2016, several years before George Floyd’s murder, but May 2020 raised the status and the visibility of your organization, focusing at that time on freeing jail protesters during the uprising. So as executive director, how do you think about that time period?
Well, that time period was very tumultuous, not just for our city and our state, our nation, or, quite frankly, the world. It was a moment in which the world stopped and people galvanized and said, “No more,” that this type of destruction can no longer be had in our names, and we want to stand up, we want to fight back, and we want to end these types of systemic oppressions.
Were you involved with the organization at that point?
I was with the ACLU of Minnesota, at the time I coordinated the “Smart Justice” campaign. We were at the table for bail reform, and so that’s how I had a lot of my initial interactions with the freedom fund.
Controversy sometimes follows an influx of attention, and the Minnesota Freedom Fund got wrapped up in a political debate. Vice President Kamala Harris tweeted about the organization, and Republicans accused Harris of helping to release violent criminals. Did the negative media attention factor into the decision to move away from directly bailing out defendants?
Oh, absolutely not. This isn’t a political decision for us. This is one of effectiveness. How do we most effectively go about accomplishing our mission, and that mission is to end the predatory practices around cash bail in Minnesota, and quite frankly, we would love to be able to help to influence the rest of the nation.
The strategy that we have utilized has been ineffective. It hasn’t created the seismic shift in policy that we would want to see. The only real way to have reasonable systemic change happen in Minnesota is through the creation of a bill at the state level or an ordinance at the county level.
But either way, we had to get into the space much deeper of policy in order to have a dramatic shift and a dramatic change, we may even have to have a constitutional amendment.
So what will be your approach going forward?
We’re doubling down on our mission of ending the predatory practice. What we found is that we’ve quite frankly resourced the system to the tune of millions of dollars over the past few years, and we have not seen the seismic shift in policy that we would want.
It’s almost like being in a boat and having holes in the boat, and working your hardest to get the water that is coming into the boat out while it’s still sinking.
The approach that we took … it just was not having that systemic impact that we would want to have.
At some point, you stop bailing and try to fix the boat
We have to fix the boat, and we have to end the practice of discriminatory and coercive bail.
