When Minneapolis became shorthand for crisis, it was tempting to treat each rupture as an isolated event: a protest here, a policy failure there, another headline moving the city further from coherence. But taken together, the last several years tell a different story. Not of collapse, but of pressure. And pressure, when sustained, doesn’t just break things it reshapes them.

What’s emerging now around public safety is not a clean reform or a single idea winning out. It’s something messier and more instructive: a city learning, in real time, that safety cannot survive as a one-owner system. That when it is treated as the sole responsibility of police (or the sole failure of police) it becomes brittle, politicized, and ultimately insufficient. Out of overreach, overcorrection, and exhaustion, Minneapolis has begun to quietly reposition public safety not as a service delivered from above, but as a public good they are building one neighborhood at a time.

Public Safety Is a Public Good

Minneapolis didn’t arrive here by choice.
It arrived here by endurance.

Years of fracture (state violence, civic betrayal, public grief) forced the city to confront a hard truth: when safety is treated as a service delivered by a single institution, it fails precisely when people need it most. ICE’s arrival didn’t create that failure. It illuminated it.

What followed wasn’t just resistance. It was reinvestment. A collective shift toward treating safety as a public good rather than a police monopoly.

Jane Jacobs understood this instinctively. She argued that cities function when people participate in their own protection. When “eyes on the street” create informal, distributed systems of care and accountability. Not surveillance. Not force. Presence.

Minneapolis didn’t rediscover that idea. It was pushed into practicing it.

From Breakdown to Shared Infrastructure

Public goods don’t emerge from optimism. They emerge from necessity.

After years of being overpoliced and underprotected, communities here developed a literacy in failure. How power moves, where response breaks down, how quickly official systems retreat when legitimacy erodes. That literacy didn’t disappear after the crisis years. It hardened into skill.

So when ICE appeared, people didn’t wait for instruction. Communication networks activated. Alerts moved faster than authority. Homes, schools, and churches became points of coordination. Safety became something produced collectively, not requested from above or reached through a three digit phone number.

This is the difference between a service and a public good. A service is something you call when something goes wrong. A public good is something you maintain together so fewer things go wrong at all.

A Necessary Overreaction

It’s impossible to talk about this moment without reckoning honestly with the death of George Floyd and the campaign that followed to DEFUND THE POLICE.

In practice, it was blunt. At times chaotic. In the short term, it exposed real fault lines…staffing gaps, slow response times, unresolved tensions between reform and reality. Those rough edges were real, and they deserved to be aired.

But DEFUND was never just a policy proposal. It was a cultural interruption.

It broke the spell of inevitability. It forced a reckoning with a dangerous assumption: that public safety must be owned, defined, and delivered by police alone. In pushing too far, it revealed how narrow the old framework had been all along.

Jane Jacobs warned against monocultures of authority. Order imposed from above may look stable, but it is brittle. When it fails, it fails everywhere at once.

DEFUND cracked that system open, not to eliminate safety, but to pluralize it.

What followed wasn’t abolition, but a rebalancing of sorts.

Safety Without Monopoly

Minneapolis could now consider testing a quieter, more durable idea: safety is strongest when it has multiple layers, and when citizens have some skin in the game.

Community networks handle early warning, mutual aid, presence, and de-escalation. Police remain necessary for serious violence, but no longer tasked with being the answer to everything. Their role could become more narrow, definitely clearer, and way more accountable.

This isn’t anti-police.
It’s anti-overreliance.

When safety is treated as a public good, no single institution owns it. Responsibility is shared. Power is distributed. This decentralized model would work less like a spider whose head could be removed leaving the body lifeless, but more like a starfish in which a limp could be cut only to grow into another star. This could move from neighborhood to neighborhood. 

Jacobs believed cities thrive when informal social controls do most of the work and formal ones step in only when needed. What Minneapolis is demonstrating now is that this isn’t nostalgia but it’s adaptation and evolution. 

Turning Harm Into Civic Capacity

Public goods are built from trust, and trust is often forged under pressure.

The same experiences that stripped credibility from institutions strengthened informal systems of care. What was taken became knowledge. What broke became connective tissue. Trauma didn’t disappear…it became capacity.

This is how we turn a negative into a positive. Not through slogans or branding or more spectacle, but through practice refined over time. Minneapolis didn’t get here because it had the right plan. It got here through failure and because it was forced to ask better questions.

After Everything, Still Ours

Public safety, when treated as a public good, belongs to everyone or it belongs to no one. Minneapolis is showing what happens when people refuse to surrender that responsibility. When safety is understood not as force, but as participation. Not as control, but as care.

What emerged after everything broke wasn’t a new authority, but rather a shared one.

Built from presence. Shaped by experience. And sustained by people who learned (together) that safety doesn’t have to be owned to be real.