'City leadership had abandoned us': Minneapolis Council member Robin Wonsley on Floyd uprising, 5 years later

Five years ago, Minneapolis City Council member Robin Wonsley was a community organizer, one of the leaders behind the movement at George Floyd Square.

Wonsley was elected to the city council in 2021 representing a new, more progressive voice — and a referendum on the old council.

She spoke with MPR News guest host Emily Reese.

Press play above to hear their conversation, or read it below, edited for time and clarity.

What hits you first when you think back at that time? What’s your strongest memory?

My strongest memory actually was the closeness of community. And we often talk about the chaos that surrounded the uprising following George Floyd’s murder, and what often is not highlighted is that that was also a moment where we had neighbors who had never talked to each other beforehand, coordinating patrols around their neighborhoods, neighborhood cleanups or community cleanups, even intermediate child care from one another.

We saw people coordinating food, considering Target and Aldi and all those stores were not accessible, so that all was volunteer-run.

People came together in a moment of immense grief, chaos and confusion, especially when at that moment, it felt as if actual leadership, city leadership, had abandoned us.

In 2021, you became the first Democratic Socialist on the city council, unseating a 14-year incumbent. A lot of people viewed your election as a referendum on the old way of doing things. Do you think that was true?

So often in Minneapolis, we pride ourselves, of course, on our progressive values and being this liberal city, but I think sometimes we do this really good thing of talking the talk, but we don’t walk the talk.

And because of that, we end up in situations where, you know, decades of inaction among the City of Minneapolis, especially in regards to them knowing they had an out-of-control, racist and violent policing department that’s been widely documented by the Department of Justice and the Minnesota Department of Human Rights.

Like you could have stopped this, and you deflected, and you did not.

Has your mission changed over the last five years? If so, how?

I would say my mission has always been around advancing a new model of public safety that does not center traditional policing, because we know there's a variety of ways in which we can keep our community safe that doesn’t require someone to show up with a gun and a badge.

And we’ve done that through the creation of the Office of Community Safety and by investing on the council side in programs like our Behavioral Crisis Response, which is our mental health professionals, by now creating social workers that are now going to be embedded in our 9-1-1 dispatch. By continuing to support our violence prevention work that’s also going to be expanded, also now by completely transforming the landscape of our precinct structures.

So we’re not doing just police stations anymore. We’re moving to a model of community safety centers. And my ward would be the first place to open this new model of public safety facilities, with the South Minneapolis Community Safety Center coming in 2026.

And we’ve been able to, over the past five years, move about 9 percent of calls that you typically would route to police away to these services. A recent report from the New York University of policing shows that we have the ability to move even more, 47 percent of those calls.

At the state level, the Minnesota Legislature passed the Minnesota Police Accountability Act in 2020. Has it had an impact on policing?

I think there’s still a way to go on the accountability piece. We’re still seeing people who are being victimized and killed by officers, and there still needs to be expansion of services at the statewide level that other municipalities can tap into to also ensure that their residents are receiving the right response, at the right time, through their own local public safety systems.

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