GOODER AND HARDER: Minnesota Nasty.
If there is one thing Minnesota Democrats can count on, it’s this: You ain’t never woke enough. Somebody can always out-woke you. Running for reelection, Hodges finished third in a field of five in 2017 and was replaced by Jacob Frey, the doorknob currently serving as mayor, a white-shoe radical lawyer who was buffaloed into letting rioters run amok and burn down his city. He tried to finesse his way to a third-way solution in the face of demands to defund the police but in the end signed a budget imposing millions of dollars of cuts on the police department in order to appease the Left.
The department now has hundreds fewer officers than it says it needs to do its job. With violent crime soaring, the city council unanimously voted to approve funding to hire more officers — but three of its members are working on a plan to abolish the police department entirely, replacing it with a new “public safety” agency that would provide social services in addition to law enforcement with progressive characteristics. A left-wing coalition comprising groups ranging from the Sex-Workers Outreach Project of Minneapolis to the Minnesota Youth Collective (“founded by young, queer, female-identifying people who practice intersectionality in organizing”) is working on a ballot initiative to the same end.
A great deal is going to depend on the upcoming trial of Derek Chauvin. In February, the New York Times reported that Chauvin had offered to plead guilty to third-degree murder in the death of George Floyd but Attorney General William Barr had scuttled the deal, believing that that agreement was too lenient. (Federal sign-off was required because the deal would have included an assurance that Chauvin would not be brought up on civil-rights or other federal charges in the future.) The trial is imminent, and the outcome is uncertain.
Thirty-Eighth and Chicago, the intersection at which Chauvin pinned down Floyd with his knee, remains closed to traffic. It won’t reopen until after the trial, if it ever does. Office workers downtown already are being told not to come to work during the trial. The state already has budgeted millions of dollars for security and anti-riot measures, and the National Guard will be called out to protect the courthouse precincts.
If there is yet another round of riots, Minneapolis may take a long time to recover. Or it may never recover. Cities such as Detroit and Newark never really recovered from the riots of the 1960s, and probably never will. Even in Minneapolis itself, the once-thriving commercial corridor along Plymouth Avenue was utterly destroyed by the 1967 riots, and it never came back. The shopping and dining district around Nicollet Mall, recently spruced up with a $50 million revitalization project, is boarded up. The number of Minneapolis establishments that were torched in the riots is shocking: the ice-cream shop on Cedar Avenue, the chiropractor on East Lake Street, travel agencies, mobile-phone shops, grocery stores, an advertising agency, a dentist’s office, a barbershop, gas stations. Retailers from Kmart to jewelry shops were looted. The list goes on and on. A city doesn’t just bounce back from that.
Or to flowchart the progression:
