Defund the police. Rent control. Drug decriminalization. Foreign policy resolutions. Here's what happened when DSA policies met reality.
It is not what they take away from you that counts. It's what you do with what you have left.
In June 2020, nine of 13 Minneapolis City Council members stood on a stage and pledged to "defund and dismantle" the Minneapolis Police Department. In November 2021, they put it to a vote. Question 2 would have eliminated the police department from the city charter and replaced it with a vaguely defined "Department of Public Safety."
Voters rejected it, 56% to 44%. Polling data showed that Black voters opposed the proposal more strongly than white voters did.
As the New York Times editorial board later published an op-ed by Minneapolis civil rights leader Nekima Levy Armstrong headlined: "Black Voters Want Better Policing, Not Posturing by Progressives."
"When someone talks about a carjacking or a shooting, it's not an abstraction. It's the life they live each and every day."
While the DSA pushes to defund, Minneapolis is in a police staffing crisis. The department dropped from 920 officers in 2019 to a low of 560 in early 2024 — well below the city charter's legal minimum of 731. Even after a historic pay raise and aggressive recruiting, the department reached just 588 officers by mid-2025. Mayor Frey himself has said Minneapolis has "fewer officers per capita than most any major U.S. city."
The DSA's platform calls to defund police "towards zero." The research says the opposite. A landmark 2021 study published in the American Economic Review by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and the University of Oregon analyzed data from 242 U.S. cities over 38 years and found:
Each additional police officer prevents 0.06 to 0.1 homicides per year. That means 10 to 17 new officers save one life annually.
The benefit is twice as large for Black victims. In per capita terms, increased policing reduces Black homicides at double the rate of white homicides.
Each officer prevents approximately 3 violent crimes and 4 property crimes per year, primarily through deterrence.
A 10% increase in police staffing reduces violent crime by 3.4% and homicides by 6.7% (Public Policy Institute of California).
The social value of one additional officer exceeds $300,000 — far more than the cost of hiring them.
By this math, Minneapolis's loss of 332 officers since 2019 could represent roughly 20 to 33 additional homicides per year that could have been prevented — disproportionately in Black neighborhoods. The DSA's answer to this crisis is to cut more. The research says we need to rebuild.
The DSA national platform calls for "universal rent control." In 2021, St. Paul voters — energized by DSA-aligned activists — approved one of the most aggressive rent control ordinances in the country: a 3% annual cap on rent increases with no exemptions for new construction.
Housing construction declined sharply following the policy's implementation.
St. Paul has since been forced to weaken the law three times. In 2022, they exempted new construction for 20 years. When that didn't work, they loosened it further. In May 2025, the city council voted to permanently exempt all housing built after 2004 — effectively gutting the original ordinance. Even Mayor Melvin Carter, who supported the original ballot measure, acknowledged the change was "essential for addressing the city's housing shortage."
Minneapolis DSA members like Robin Wonsley and Jason Chavez continue to champion rent control for Minneapolis despite St. Paul's cautionary tale right across the river.
In November 2024, the DSA-aligned council majority passed a resolution creating a "Labor Standards Board" — a 15-member panel empowered to recommend industry-wide regulations on wages, benefits, and workplace conditions.
The problem: the board's composition was designed to ensure labor interests would always outvote business interests. Of 15 seats, the council would appoint 12 and the mayor just 3. Business groups — including nearly 400 businesses who signed a letter of opposition — warned that recommendations from the board would be politically impossible for a labor-friendly council to ignore.
"We're not feeling very comfortable that this is truly going to be a balanced board. To pass it without so much of hearing from the businesses this will impact does not give us a lot of hope that we're going to have a fair seat at that table." — Angie Whitcomb, Hospitality Minnesota
The Minneapolis Regional Chamber, Minneapolis Downtown Council, Hospitality Minnesota, and Minnesota Retailers formed a coalition called "Minneapolis Works Together" and vowed to refuse to participate in the board entirely.
Mayor Frey vetoed the measure, saying "business participation isn't just important, it's essential. Under the council's proposal, business participation is negligible." Two council members — Jamal Osman and Andrea Jenkins — then broke with the DSA bloc and sustained the veto, with Jenkins explaining that small-business owners, "many of whom are women and people of color," felt they had "not had a voice in how the Labor Standards Board was drafted."
In October 2024, Robin Wonsley authored a resolution to impose a "carbon tax" on the 36 biggest emitters in Minneapolis — calling it "one of the most meaningful steps we can take to combat climate change." The city attorney's office determined it violated state law. Minnesota only allows cities to charge regulatory fees to recoup costs, not to levy punitive emissions taxes.
Every DSA-aligned council member voted for Wonsley's resolution anyway. Every traditional liberal voted against it. Mayor Frey vetoed it. Had Wonsley not been absent for the override vote, the council would have set Minneapolis on a direct legal collision course with the state of Minnesota.
The DSA national platform calls to "repeal local ordinances that criminalize people involved in the… drug trades" and to "end the criminalization of working-class survival." Two jurisdictions tried versions of this approach. Both reversed course.
Oregon decriminalized possession of all hard drugs in February 2021 — removing criminal penalties for small amounts of heroin, meth, fentanyl, and cocaine. Police issued $100 tickets with a phone number for treatment. Almost no one called.
Oregon's legislature recriminalized drug possession in March 2024 with bipartisan support. Democratic Governor Tina Kotek signed it. A state representative called Measure 110 a "misguided decriminalization experiment."
British Columbia launched a three-year drug decriminalization pilot in January 2023, removing penalties for possessing up to 2.5 grams of hard drugs. The province recorded a record 2,511 overdose deaths in 2023 — and nearly 14,000 since declaring a public health emergency in 2016. Public drug use and disorder surged to the point where the province began rolling back the policy in April 2024. Ontario Premier Doug Ford said B.C.'s experiment "turned into a nightmare." The province officially ended decriminalization on January 31, 2026.
Both experiments shared the same fatal flaw: they removed consequences without building the treatment infrastructure needed to actually help people. As one analysis concluded, the approach succeeded at "the normalization of drug use" rather than "the normalization of rehabilitation."
The DSA-aligned council has devoted significant time to international affairs resolutions.
DSA member Aisha Chughtai led the council to pass the "strongest ceasefire resolution in the country" — demanding not just a ceasefire, but an end to all U.S. military funding to Israel. This language directly mirrors the DSA national platform. Mayor Frey, who is Jewish, vetoed it as "one-sided." The DSA bloc overrode his veto 9-3.
In March 2026, the council debated two resolutions: one urging normalization of U.S. relations with Cuba (the DSA platform explicitly calls to "support normalization of relations with Cuba"), and another asking European financial institutions to stop investing in companies that contract with the Department of Homeland Security.
The Cuba resolution passed 7-6. The European divestment resolution passed 9-4. The meeting included multiple disruptions.
Council Member Aurin Chowdhury complained of colleagues "laughing and making snide remarks" as she spoke. LaTrisha Vetaw walked over to Chowdhury and told her she wasn't going to be told what to do. Vetaw then dressed down Council President Payne, accusing him of giving "friends" preferential treatment. Members began talking over each other until Payne called a recess.
After a vote to shelve a public safety training center for more review, activists in the audience broke out chanting "Stop Cop City!" and unfurled a large banner, forcing another recess.
The DSA bloc's local record tells a consistent story: pursue ideological goals over practical governance, override the mayor at every turn, and use a city council seat as a platform for national political causes.
When rent control was tried in St. Paul, housing construction collapsed 81%. When they built a labor board, they rigged it against the small businesses that employ their own constituents. When they passed a carbon fee, their own city attorney said it was illegal. When they passed foreign policy resolutions, they did so over the objections of the city's Jewish community and its Jewish mayor.
And when Oregon and British Columbia tried the drug decriminalization approach the DSA advocates, both experiments ended in failure and reversal — leaving the most vulnerable people worse off than before.
Humphrey built a DFL that governed for working people. He fought the communists not because they were too liberal, but because they prioritized ideology over the real needs of the people they claimed to serve.
The DSA bloc's local record proves they are making the same mistake. They push rent control while housing construction collapses. They debate Cuba resolutions while Council Member Warren asks where they are when Black children are killed on the streets of North Minneapolis. They tried to defund the police while Minneapolis sits 143 officers below its charter minimum.
This isn't governing. It's performance — and the people paying the price are the ones who can least afford it.