DeWayne Davis said he wants to empower people if he is elected mayor of Minneapolis.

Davis lives in North Minneapolis with his husband Kareem Murphy. Davis and Murphy moved to Minneapolis from Washington D.C. so Davis could begin his ministry work as the senior pastor at All People’s Church beginning in 2013. He has been the lead minister at Plymouth Congregational Church since December 2020.

Before his time in ministry, Davis spent a decade as a senior legislative assistant in Washington D.C., working for Congressmen Pete Visclosky, Chet Edwards, and Steny Hoyer. All three members were on the Appropriations Committee and Davis assisted in spending bills that focused on health care, education, Social Security, transportation, and housing. While in the nation’s capital he also worked on the Democratic Leadership Council, did contract work for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and was the director of Federal and Industry Relations at Sallie Mae.

Transitioning into church work, Davis was the National Episcopal Church’s domestic policy advisor during the Barack Obama years. There he advocated for climate change and stimulus bills, and the Affordable Care Act.

In Minneapolis, Davis has been a politically-minded reverend. Mayor Jacob Frey selected him in 2021 to co-chair a Community Safety Workgroup with Nekima Levy Armstrong. Davis also facilitated community conversations in early 2024 when the City was choosing an independent evaluator to monitor the State consent decree.

Melody Hoffmann interviewed the Rev. DeWayne Davis on Feb. 11 at Butter Bakery Cafe.

SWV: If people only know you here in Minneapolis, they see you as a reverend.

DeWayne Davis: That's right.

SWV: So, what would you say to someone who is hesitant to vote for you due to your lack of experience in public office?

DD: I would say, ‘Well, I've spent more time working in politics than I have in ministry.’

SWV: Why did you choose to go back into politics and run for mayor?

DD: People had always approached me at different points saying, ‘Have you thought about running?’ Especially when they found out about my background. I always said no. Since George Floyd was murdered, I went in more deeply asking the City, ‘How can I help?’ I was really beginning to see and feel that the current mayor either was out of his depth around how to respond, or was insecure or afraid. All I know is that I didn't feel he was showing up. I didn't feel that he was really bringing to bear the full weight of the office, let alone bringing us together.

I want people to know that they don't have to just settle for a City Council that's fighting each other, or a mayor that seems to exacerbate problems rather than solve them. They don't have to settle for any of that. We can really be worthy of the accolades that we have. The most livable city, the most walkable city, the city with the best quality of life, the city that has some progressive voices in the Midwest, we can earn that. We can live it. We can be true to it.

SWV: How do you plan to work with the City Council if you are elected mayor?

DD: I will make my strong commitment to be in conversation with them from the beginning. I don't think you're ever going to have to guess where I want to be. And I welcome to hear back from the councilmembers about their vision and ideas so that we don't have to guess. We don’t have to play games with each other.

Let's say we find out we disagree vehemently. Then the question becomes, what is our shared goal? Where do we want to go? Because I guarantee you, more often than not, we all want to get to the same place. We all want people to be safely housed. We want an accountable police department that recognizes the inherent worth and dignity of every person they encounter. We just disagree on how to get there.

I think I can model that as the leader. It's what I do with churches.

I am always prepared to lose. When I lose, I don't take up my marbles. I don't make you my permanent enemy. I will come back and try to convince you. I will try to thread the needle to where I want to go. I'm not fighting for some kind of political advantage. I'm not naive. I worked in politics for a long time. My first job was when the Newt Gingrich Congress took over, and I thought my life was over.

I'm also going to be listening and to creatively engage, not just with the City Council, but with the voters, too. Why doesn't the mayor have a joint community meeting with every councilmember in their ward and be there to talk to the people at least once? That puts us all in there, in accountability.

SWV: Crime has gone down nationwide, but in Minneapolis, our murder rate is staying the same. What would your approach be to lowering our murder rate and to public safety over all?

DD: I talk about community safety, as opposed to public safety. I really do believe that we are living the consequences of our failure to seriously keep our promises on providing opportunities for underserved communities.

One of the reasons we have this intractable problem is that we have not provided a pathway of opportunity, especially for young men of color here, but people of color in general. The disparities tell that story. It’s disparity in education, economics, and jobs.

We must have a sustained investment in underserved communities, especially communities of color. Real investment opportunities around education and jobs. That should be our focus. The County has a whole department on disparity reduction. Are we in communication with the County? Are we really talking about how we are targeting Minneapolis, given that we are the largest jurisdiction?

We've got to change our whole perception of what it means to have opportunity. We've got to stop hoarding resources for our favorite neighborhoods, for our favorite people, or for the people we think deserve it. We have got to have a broader investment in our city so we provide opportunities for people.

SWV: Do you want to defund the police or not use the police to address the violence in our city then?

DD: That’s a false choice, it’s a ‘gotcha.’ When I was co-chair of the Community Safety Work Group, in North Minneapolis, one thing I kept hearing over and over again is: ‘We need the police, we want police to come when we call them, and we want them to respect us when they get here.’ The shorthand was, ‘we want the kind of policing that wealthy people get and the people around the lakes get.’ We still need police that are accountable. We also need to transform the culture of policing that is people-centered as opposed to warrior-centered, or an occupying force.

One of our recommendations in that work group was to broaden the recruitment to bring people in from non-traditional pathways. If you get those perspectives, not only are you likely to get different approaches to how you deal with people, but you also are likely to touch people from various communities.

We also have an opportunity with the consent agreement. I facilitated the community conversations when we were looking for independent monitors. There were some jurisdictions where they had a wonderful experience with the consent agreement, and then there were other jurisdictions where it utterly failed. The question that I kept asking as the facilitator was, ‘Why does a consent agreement fail? Why does it not transform things?’  And they consistently said that a consent agreement fails when the City leadership abandons it, or the City leadership does not keep it front and center.

SWV: How would you address unsheltered homelessness as mayor? A lot of people are concerned about encampments in the city, if you could talk about that specifically.

DD: What I've largely been concerned about is, sometimes the mayor and other people say, ‘I have no choice, I have to break up the encampments.’ Even if I understand from the vantage point of making tough decisions, my concern is that's where it seems to stop.

The first thing that the City needs to do is to leverage its power of the purse, its regulatory power and its legislative power with the City Council to come up with ways of setting the table for providers, and even the County and the State to come and help us. Where are the dollars we're investing to respond to it? Do we have dollars appropriated for the express purpose of responding to encampments?

When I was asking about encampments, the only thing I was hearing from the Mayor's Office was, ‘Well, the County or State didn't do this.’ What have we asked of them concretely that they can help us do? Once we have that plan for how we're going to respond from a human needs perspective, as opposed to a criminal perspective, we can go to the County or State and say, ‘Here's what we need from you.’ From the County that will be dollars, but from the State that might be a legislative fix that we've identified. Again, that's hard work, and it's something that you have to be willing to try and experiment.  So that's the way I would do it. That's long-term, hard work. It starts with some real tough decisions. It starts with asking the City to help us invest in something.

I do believe that people will be willing to do that if they don't want to see an encampment next to their home.  Yes, we're going to expend some money, but we've got to show them what we want to do. We've got to put that plan out for them, to show what we're trying to accomplish. Because it's just a Pyrrhic victory when you see the police coming, but we just moved the encampment to somebody else's neighborhood. And how do we stop that from happening? It’s a whack-a-mole approach that no one's going to ever be happy with if we just go ahead and sweep it, but we don't have a short-term, intermediate or long-term plan to get us away from it. And that's going to require us to do some investing in a way that we probably haven't done in a while.

SWV: What role should the City play in supporting small businesses?

DD: I believe every mayoral candidate, including the incumbent mayor, agrees with this–we should always be in the conversation and part of any effort to incubate small business. We should be there to incubate those businesses.

I heard from one citizen, I thought it was a pretty good idea, a person to come in who has the experience to help us look at some of those old regulatory things that creates a barrier to opening businesses. Sort of an ombudsman, someone who can come in and say, ‘What are some of the barriers just to get your business off the ground?’

Cities are the hub of economic growth. Businesses want to be in Minneapolis. We do a lot of incentivizing. We use the tax code to try to incentivize big business to come here. I think we've been missing an opportunity. When we are the site of a business that wants to locate here and we are thinking about the package of tax incentives we want to offer, we also need to be in conversation. Can they make a commitment to contracting with small businesses for services? Can they make a commitment to looking at our local businesses as a part of the way they do their business? Have them be a part of our conversation of incubating but also supporting existing small businesses. That creates a new way of understanding how you exist in a city.

In the short-term, the larger issue is safety. Our small businesses in Stevens Square are suffering because we have had an uptick in crime. The CVS is leaving now. And I know one of the things they're going to say is the issue around theft. That certainly figures into their decision. This goes back to the work we have to do around community safety, because those storefront customers are going to come to business where they feel safe to go. And so we really still have to get a handle, not only on our policing to make sure that we have coverage, but we also need to work on community safety.

SWV: How would you describe your leadership style?

DD: My leadership style is to empower people. I have heard that so many people have left the City because their ideas and their gifts were not accepted, not included. Many were pushed out because they didn't tow the line, ideological or even political.

When I become mayor, I’m telling you now, if you are a staff in exile, you are welcome to come back and let’s begin to think about how we are going to move this city forward.

I don't need to be anybody's savior. I am not a king. The more hands you have, the more ideas at the table. The one thing that I saw when I moved here is that we have a lot of smart, talented people, and there's no reason why we can't take advantage of and open up the way of bringing those people in. We need smart people all bringing to bear their talents and their gifts to help us figure a way forward.

I think we have so much to show this country, and given the kind of administration we have in the federal government, now we're going to be the laboratories of democracy here. We're going to be the cutting edge of policy making around climate, around human needs. We've got a government that says they're not going to do that anymore. Right now is not a time to jealously guard some fiefdom around the Mayor's Office or the City Council. This is not a time for any of that. This is time to get everybody back in to start doing that good work, and it's all the more needed now.

Southwest Voices covered Davis’ campaign launch in January.

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This article was updated on Feb. 24 to adjust a broken link and on Feb. 25 to add information to the article.