“We all want to see a difference,” says Vinee Raynell,a 24-year-old black woman wearing a grey T-shirt with the words'Get Your Knee Off My Neck'written on the front.

Raynell has been at George Floyd Square every week,performing poetry and educating tourists who might view the space as little more than an Instagram opportunity.

“Some people come here and don’t talk to people in my community,"she says."I’ve been having some issues with that lately because at the end of the day,we want real change. This ain’t for a moment,this ain’t for a season – this is for my future. I want to see 25. I don’t just wanna be a name on the street.”

Burnt down and torn apart when it became ground zero for the Black Lives Matter uprisings,Minneapolis is now struggling with the daunting challenge of rebuilding during a pandemic-fuelled recession.

But across this diverse city - from its sport stadiums and megamalls,to its migrant-owned eateries and sprawling parks - many are now fiercely debating Minneapolis’ civic future and asking if it can repair the historical inequalities that have defined it.

Around 1000 storefronts were damaged or destroyed during the three nights that rioters ripped through the twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul,vandalising buildings,looting shops and setting family businesses on fire.

Today,many of those businesses along a five kilometre stretch on Lake Street lie in ruins or remain covered in plywood,making parts of Minneapolis look more like a former war zone than a modern metropolis built along the Mississippi River.

In the wake of the riots,a controversial proposal to “defund the police” has split the city’s council and exacerbated tensions between the Black Lives Matter movement and law enforcement officers - some of whom are handing back their badges and leaving the force.

The idea is not to get rid of law enforcement entirely,but to reallocate funding to a new “holistic” public safety department,with a renewed focus on social services,such as homelessness,mental health,or drug and alcohol programs.

But in a city where police last week reported an increase in break-ins,carjackings and gang violence,any suggestion to take money away from police departments is political powder keg – particularly for a US President campaigning on an aggressive law-and-order agenda.

In the middle of the night on May 30,Don Blyly arrived at the site of the science fiction bookstore he’s owned for 46 years to find it engulfed in flames.

“I was supportive of the peaceful protesters,but there were a lot of out-of-town trouble makers who came in and were using the legitimate protesters as cover,” the 69-year-old tellsThe Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

“You had some right-wing people who were coming in to try to launch a race war;you had Nazis coming in to specifically target minority-owned businesses;you had anarchists coming into town to try to destroy capitalism by destroying businesses;and then you had plain nut-cases of all political stripes. It was a mess.”

Today,America’s oldest sci-fi bookstore is a pile of scorched books and bricks on Chicago Avenue,about nine blocks from where Floyd died,the smell of burnt pages still lingering in the air.

Blyly,however,is one of the luckier ones because he hasn’t lost everything. He estimates about $US1 million worth of products went up in flames,but he's managed to get by,at least for now,due to online sales,which he began when coronavirus hit.

AGo-Fund Me campaign also raised more than $161,00 within weeks,as tributes poured in from sci-fi fans in Australia and all over the world,recounting memories of the classics they’d purchased or the authors who held in-store readings over the years.

Nonetheless,Blyly remains frustrated by how long it’s taking to move forward:even getting bids for demolition and debris removal has taken weeks. Now,he says,“my life is in limbo”.

Economic disparities have always existed in Minneapolis,where one in five of its 437,000 citizens are black. But faced with the triple whammy of coronavirus,a battered economy and a civil uprising,the gap between white and non-white residents has widened even further.

Riz Prakasim,a pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Roseville,says many now fear that Minneapolis will be “yesterday’s news”.

“We really hope our city officials support us to rebuild together;that it wasn’t just a photo opportunity to stand in front of a burned building and say ‘we’re going to help’,” he says.

The scale of the task is not lost on Erik Hansen,the City of Minneapolis’ director of economic policy and development.

As someone whose job is to monitor economic activity,the sadness in his voice is palpable as he talks about the “heartbreaking” struggle residents now face,particularly in the poorest neighbourhoods in the north and south-central districts.

Surveyors have conservatively estimated that the “observable damage” bill for 700 of the city’s most hard hit businesses could be at least $US500 million.

But beyond the bricks and mortar is the human toll,Hansen says. One in four Minneapolis residents have lost their jobs since March when COVID-19 took hold. When coronavirus unemployment benefits expired this week after Democrats and Republicans couldn’t agree on an extension,about 40,000 residents became $600 a week poorer.

Young black residents suffer the most - those without college degrees who work in restaurants,grocery stores,and other services industries that have since been damaged or destroyed.

As Hansen describes it:“It’s like having a cold,and then breaking your leg,and then getting pneumonia.”

In a bid to assist in the recovery,funding has been boosted to community based organisations,which do most of the service provision under Minneapolis’ public-private-partnership model. One of those groups,Lake Street Council,says it has already awarded $4.5 million in grants to 250 businesses that were either partially or fully damaged. Outreach teams are providing free legal and insurance assistance,as well as mental health support.

The question is whether it’s enough.

“We might be able to bounce back,” says Hansen,“but the current status is really tragic.”

It’s shortly after 2pm when a teenage boy takes centre stage at the Bloomington Civic Plaza,about 17 kilometres from downtown Minneapolis,for a “Back the Blue” rally in honour of police.

“Blue Lives Matter! Blue Lives Matter!” he chants into a megaphone.

A crowd of about 150 people have gathered around him. They’re friendly,mostly white,and overwhelmingly Republican. Some are holding corflutes with Donald Trump’s name,others are wearing “Bikers for Trump” patches or MAGA hats.

One woman,who grabs the megaphone after the boy,urges everyone to make sure they vote on November 3.

“Are we going to vote for the party that supports life,liberty and freedom?” she asks. “Are we going to support the party that supports our law enforcement and keeps a line between us and anarchy?”

Two kilometres down the road,in the carpark of John F Kennedy High School,a louder and more diverse crowd of at least 500 people are attending a Black Lives Matter demonstration calling for criminal justice reform and an end to police brutality. One student holds up a sign that reads:“So Bad Even Introverts are Protesting.”

Among the speakers is Paul Johnson,the friend of another high-profile victim of a fatal shooting by Minneapolis Police,Travis Jordan.

Two years ago,Jordan,then 36,was shot eight times in the front yard of the house Johnson owned,not long after his girlfriend called 911 to tell them he was suicidal. He’d refused to come out of the house when officers arrived,and became increasingly agitated by their presence.

One of the officers,Ryan Keyes,would later claim that he could see Jordan through a window holding a Chefmate knife with an 8.25-inch blade in his right hand. After Jordan opened the front door and edged towards the officers,shots were fired.

The Hennepin County Attorney’s office argued that Keyes and his colleague,Neal Walsh,were “justified in using deadly force”. But others believe that Jordan’s death is a clear example of the need to defund police to end what they see as systemic discrimination against people of colour,manifested in the tendency of some police to view them as suspects first,and citizens second.

“Some people want to sit by the sidelines and say this is a person of colour’s problem,but it’s not their goddamn problem,” Johnson,who is white,tells the fired-up crowd.

“We built the goddamn system,now it’s time to tear it down!”

There’s no one-size-fits-all model when it comes to defunding police,but in general it involves city councils cutting police budgets and offloading police functions to social services and other community departments.

Minneapolis is a litmus test. Law enforcement officers would still exist but there would be less reliance on police to deal with people such as Travis Jordan,or minor call-outs such as George Floyd’s alleged attempt to pass a fake $20 bill,which led to his arrest and eventual death.

Some are also calling on the city to scrap School Resource Officers,who are deployed by police departments to deal with students.

“Imagine how much safer schools would be if we no longer employed SROs but focused on hiring more counsellors?” says Cassie Pagel,an English teacher at Jefferson High School in Bloomington.

Critics,however,say divesting from the police will make communities less safe. Officers will become more risk averse,they insist,while property prices will rise as people “flee” the neighbourhood.

In a congressional hearing last week,Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr also noted that “the threat to black lives posed by crime on the streets is massively greater than any threat posed by police misconduct.”

Those at the pro-police rally at the Bloomington Civic Centre tend to agree. One man carrying a large American flag,who gives his name only as “John”,points to violent protests in Portland,Oregon,as a sign that the country needs more police,not less.

“Defunding police won’t change anything,” he says. “Burning down buildings won’t change anything. Will these rallies change anything? Probably not in our lifetime.”

Eight weeks after his Indian restaurant went up in flames,Ruhel Islam lives in hope.

For 12 years,Gandhi Mahal had not just been a place to eat,but also a community hub where ideas about sustainability and climate change – a passion for many local customers – could be debated.

But on May 28,the restaurant was caught in a fire from a neighbouring eatery. A few doors away,the Third Precinct headquarters of the Minneapolis Police Department had also gone up in flames.

It was the same police precinct where Floyd’s killer,Derek Chauvin,had worked.

Growing up in Bangladesh under an autocratic government,Islam views protests as a fundamental right of democracy.

He’s also supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement:before his business burnt down,local medics asked if they could use the restaurant to treat injured protesters. He immediately set up a makeshift hospital in one of the rooms and kept the kitchen going so that dahl was available for anyone who was hungry.

“We protest,we participate,we fight for justice – even if it’s someone we don’t know. This is what Minneapolis is all about,” he says.

Like Don Blyly on Chicago Avenue,Islam is one of the countless small business owners whose livelihoods have been fundamentally altered by the events that took place in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.

But he believes the tragedy was a wake up call:a 21st century lynching that jolted America’s psyche and broke the world’s collective heart. Now,he says,it’s time to “find a way to heal and ensure that the systems and policies change”.

“The world now realises that the main problem is hundreds of years of injustice,” he says.

“But we have a blank canvas. We can come back stronger than ever.”