After police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, Democrats in the Legislature renewed calls to lift a state ban on residency requirements for police, which currently prevents cities and counties in Minnesota from making officers live where they work.
House DFLers argued that officers are less likely to use excessive force on their neighbors, though Senate Republicans said a residency requirement can hurt recruitment and subject officers to public backlash in the communities they police.
And when it comes to the question of residency incentives, lawmakers may not have changed much — if anything at all.
Incentives explored in the past
State law has not explicitly authorized local governments to offer incentives, though it did not appear to prevent it either.
To that end, Minneapolis officials believe the city could already offer residency incentives, which are meant to entice police into their communities.
In 2017, the Minneapolis City Council directed staff to explore incentives for public safety employees. At the time, according to the Star Tribune, then-Council Member Jacob Frey said “there is room to provide incentives” under state law. “Collectively, we’ve been talking about this for a while,” Frey said. “It’s high time that we do something.”
While the city never approved any incentives for police, Minneapolis spokesman Casper Hill said they still maintain they have had authority to do so.
Ultimately, it was more a political hurdle, not necessarily a legal one, that stopped the push for incentives. Chris Coleman, who was mayor at the time, vetoed the resolution. In a letter to the council, he said where officers live “should remain a choice.”
“I have concerns about incentivizing one group of City employees over another in this regard,” Coleman wrote. “What’s more, if the goal of this measure is — in part — to ensure a continued focus on diversifying our police department, then I think a physical address makes less of a difference than life experience and background.”
In an interview Wednesday, Coleman said there may have been legal hurdles, but either way he preferred other methods of trying to get police to live in St. Paul, and viewed a focus on where officers live as a “simple and wrong” solution to a complex problem. “Whether somebody lives in Roseville or Como Park is not going to change the underlying issue of whether police are policing equitably in communities of color,” he said.
But Coleman and Tolbert also mentioned the possibility of offering preference “points” in the hiring process to St. Paul residents — similar to a state law that allows employers to favor veterans.
Officials in Duluth and Rochester told MinnPost they don’t currently offer incentives and have not pursued them.
During a Senate floor debate on Tuesday, Sen. Kari Dziedzic, a Minneapolis DFLer who preferred to lift the ban on residency requirements, questioned whether the incentive legislation constitutes a reform at all. She said lawmakers could have learned more about the value and legality of the incentives if they had held a public hearing on the bill — which was passed around 2 a.m. after being disclosed to the public just hours before.
Sen. Warren Limmer, a Maple Grove Republican who helped craft the compromise deal, answered: “We just couldn’t seem to come to a clear understanding of a forced residency so we opted for this.”
When asked if cities could already adopt residency incentives, Patricia Beety, general counsel for the League of Minnesota Cities, said they have not explicitly been authorized in law.
Yet Beety also said cities can offer benefits to employees as long as there is a “public purpose” for the cost and “specific or implied authority” in statute or a city’s charter. Do residency incentives qualify? The League said that question must be judged in part on the type of benefit a city might try to offer.
Clearing up a murky debate
The residency incentive was not the only measure approved by lawmakers to draw criticism. Lawmakers heralded a ban on most use of chokeholds and neck restraints — though many police departments prohibited them already. The state will now require officers to intervene when they see a colleague using improper force, though the vast majority of more than a dozen police departments interviewed by MinnPost earlier this year said they already had such a policy.
And while the Legislature blocked police departments from offering “warrior”-style training, unions could still provide the courses and officers could independently seek them out.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday, House Speaker Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, did not address residency incentives. But she said the legislation makes chokehold restrictions “universal policy” and makes a duty to intervene for officers witnessing improper force “absolutely clear in law.” Other measures, like central aggregation of data on police use of force, have the possibility of being “transformational,” Hortman said.
Ultimately, the new policing laws remove any doubt over the power of cities and counties to offer residency incentives.
Limmer, on the Senate Floor, said top lawmakers hoped to “encourage” cities to look at the idea and wanted to ensure “that we don’t hinder them in any way in state law from creating some kind of incentive.”
In St. Paul, Tolbert said the issue hasn’t come before the council recently, but after the new law, he may explore incentives again. “I think it’s something we should look at, as I thought back then,” he said. “Mayor Coleman’s justification for (vetoing) it is true, we want life experience, we want the best possible officers. But I think being a St. Paul citizen as well as an officer adds to that life experience in the community.”
