Pack the council chambers! Minneapolis city council meeting voting on restoring protections for protestors.

Minneapolis City Council’s Public Safety & Regulatory Services Committee Meeting

Wednesday, July 16
1:00 p.m.
Minneapolis City Hall
350 S 5th Street, Room 317
Minneapolis

Over the last month, the Minneapolis City Council has been working on new resolutions. They claim they want to make it easier to exercise free speech but, in reality, they passed one resolution requiring us to get permits to demonstrate—something we’ve never had to do before. Then they passed another resolution that has some loosely-worded protections for activists but that throws out the 2000 resolution and all of its truly important protections.

A proposal by councilmember Cam Gordon would bring many of the important protections from the 2000 resolution into the new resolution. This proposal was shunted off to the Public Safety and Regulatory Services committee, which was supposed to hear it on June 25th but they postponed it to their July 16th meeting at request of the police department.

If you want to be safe when protesting the RNC, members of this committee, the rest of the city council and the mayor need to hear from us NOW! They need to know we are not going to let them take away the hard-won protections of the 2000 resolution and we are not going to sit idly by while they empower cops to use rubber bullets on protesters. We need to demand they pass Cam Gordon’s proposed changes to Resolution 2008R-248: Resolution Adopting Police Policies Regarding Public Assemblies.

There won’t be a public hearing but that doesn’t mean we can’t make our presence felt! Bring signs and statements to hand to the members. Pack the council chambers!