vowed to dismantle the 800-member agency. “It is clear that our system of policing is not keeping our communities safe,” City Council President Lisa Bender said Sunday. “Our efforts at incremental reform have failed, period.”It’s not the first time an American city has wrestled with how to deal with a police department accused of being overly aggressive or having bias in its ranks.
In Ferguson, Missouri — where a white officer in 2014 fatally shot Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old — then-Attorney General Eric Holder said federal authorities considered dismantling the police department.