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"Since the beginning of the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2014, police brutality, police violence, and police reform have emerged as central public policy concerns, and throughout that time, Minneapolis has been at the center of these conversations, both as a leader in progressive police reform and as a demonstration of the failure of those reforms. From solidarity protests with Ferguson in 2014, to an occupation of a police precinct following the killing of Jamar Clark in 2015, protests following the death of Justine Damond (Ruszczyk) in 2017, and the uprising following George Floyd's murder in 2020, activists in Minneapolis have long demanded that the city take measures to make Black Lives Matter. In 2020, these demands shifted from police reform and accountability toward police defunding and abolition, culminating in a deeply contested ballot initiative to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety-a debate that has come to symbolize the rift in opinion about the role of policing that continues to divide the nation. The Minneapolis Reckoning uses Minneapolis as a case study to understand policing, police violence, and anti-police-violence activism in the twenty-first century. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2021, as well as detailed historical analyses of transformations in the Minneapolis Police Department from the Great Migration to the present, Michelle Phelps tells the complex story of elected officials, elite interests, activist organizers, and residents struggling to gain power over the police. Tracing the ways in which movements pushing for the transformation of policing have crashed into the local politics of race, inequality, and violence, both in the years leading up to the murder of George Floyd and in its aftermath, Phelps offers revealing lessons about the political struggle over policing and the power of social movements for racial justice to create change"--

Challenges to racialized policing, from early reform efforts to BLM protests and the aftermath of George Floyd's murder The eruption of Black Lives Matter protests against police violence in 2014 spurred a wave of police reform. One of the places to embrace this reform was Minneapolis, Minnesota, a city long known for its liberal politics. Yet in May 2020, four of its officers murdered George Floyd. Fiery protests followed, making the city a national emblem for the failures of police reform. In response, members of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to "end" the Minneapolis Police Department. In The Minneapolis Reckoning, Michelle Phelps describes how Minneapolis arrived at the brink of police abolition.Phelps explains that the council's pledge did not come out of a single moment of rage, but decades of organizing efforts. Yet the politics of transforming policing were more complex than they first appeared. Despite public outrage over police brutality, the council's initiatives faced stiff opposition, including by Black community leaders who called for more police protection against crime as well as police reform. In 2021, voters ultimately rejected the ballot measure to end the department. Yet change continued on the ground, as state and federal investigations pushed police reform and city leaders and residents began to develop alternative models of safety.The Minneapolis Reckoning shows how the dualized meaning of the police—as both the promise of state protection and the threat of state violence—creates the complex politics of policing that thwart change. Phelps's account of the city's struggles over what constitutes real accountability, justice, and safety offers a vivid picture of the possibilities and limits of challenging police power today

Scholarship on the expansion of the U.S. carceral state has primarily focused on imprisonment rates. Yet the majority of adults under formal criminal justice control are on probation, an "alternative" form of supervision. This article develops the concept of mass probation and builds a typology of state control regimes that theorizes both the scale and type of punishment states employ. Drawing on Bureau of Justice Statistics data from 1980 and 2010, I analyze whether mass probation developed in the same places, affecting the same demographic groups and driven by the same criminal justice trends, as mass imprisonment. The results show that mass probation was a unique state development, expanding in unusual places like Minnesota and Washington. The conclusions argue for a reimagining of the causes and consequences of the carceral state to incorporate the expansion of probation.

After four decades of steady growth,U.S. states' prison populations finally appear to be declining, driven by a range of sentencing and policy reforms. One of the most popular reform suggestions is to expand probation supervision in lieu of incarceration. However, the classic socio‐legal literature suggests that expansions of probation instead widen the net of penal control and lead to higher incarceration rates. This article reconsiders probation in the era of mass incarceration, providing the first comprehensive evaluation of the role of probation in the build‐up of the criminal justice system. The results suggest that probation was not the primary driver of mass incarceration in most states, nor is it likely to be a simple panacea to mass incarceration. Rather, probation serves both capacities, acting as an alternative and as a net‐widener, to varying degrees across time and place. Moving beyond the question of diversion versus net widening, this article presents a new theoretical model of the probation‐prison link that examines the mechanisms underlying this dynamic. Using regression models and case studies, I analyze how states can modify the relationship between probation and imprisonment by changing sentencing outcomes and the practices of probation supervision. When combined with other key efforts, reforms to probation can be part of the movement to reverse mass incarceration.