Mitchell Brown

Columbus City Council has dropped a plan to delay the hiring of police recruits. Council president Shannon Hardin abandoned the proposal on Monday, saying he lacked the votes needed to pass the measure as part of the city budget.

Last summer, as protesters demanding racial justice flooded Columbus streets, a meme began passing around social media, depicting the city budget as a bar graph with police spending dwarfing every other expenditure. 

Columbus City Council passed a handful of amendments to the 2021 city budget on Thursday, including one that suspends police hiring until a recruiting audit concludes later this year. 

Columbus City Council is promising short-term reforms for the police and committing to longer term, structural transformation. Council members aim to complete the first wave of legislation by the end of July.

At protest after protest in Columbus, demonstrators have waved signs with calls to action like "abolish the police," "disband the police" or "defund the police."

There's a lot of money to account for: Columbus spends more than a third of its nearly $1 billion budget on police.

With protesters again demonstrating in downtown Columbus, City Council on Monday voted to declare racism a public health crisis. 

In a past life, as registrar of the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, Columbus City Council member Mitchell Brown says he got a keen understanding of the challenges aging Ohioans face.