Defunding the Police, Minneapolis Edition

While, as Mike notes, other cities are making ready to defund their police, Minneapolis has a head start.  Here are the results, as reported by none other than the Washington Post.  Its headline is, “Minneapolis violence surges as police officers leave department in droves.”  The story underneath the headline doesn’t get any better; instead, it gets considerably worse.

Here’s how it starts:

MINNEAPOLIS — The sound of gunfire has become so familiar across North Minneapolis that Cathy Spann worries she has grown numb to it.

Day and night the bullets zip through this predominantly Black neighborhood, hitting cars and homes and people. The scores of victims have included a 7-year-old boy, wounded in a drive-by shooting; a woman who took a bullet that came through her living room wall while she was watching television with her family; and a 17-year-old girl shot in the head and killed.

Spann, a longtime community activist who works for the Jordan Area Community Council, cannot recall another time when things were this bad — not even when the city was branded “Murderapolis,” during a spike in violence in the mid-1990s.

The police are not as much a presence as they used to be, Spann said, noting that sometimes when neighbors call 911, officers are delayed in responding or don’t come at all.

“If you want to talk about pandemics, we’re dealing with a pandemic of violence,” Spann said on a recent afternoon, just as word came of two more nearby shootings. “We’re under siege. You wake up and go to bed in fear, because you don’t know what’s going to happen next. . . . And our city has failed to protect us.”

The most basic function of government is to safeguard the lives of its citizens.  Minneapolis’s failure to do so is nothing short of grotesque.  And as usual, those hit first and worst are minorities  —  exactly those in whose name the “Defund” groups claim, with their usual snickering deceit, to be acting.

Nearly six months after George Floyd’s death here sparked massive protests and left a wide swath of the city burned and destroyed, Minneapolis is grappling with dueling crises: an unprecedented wave of violence and droves of officer departures that the Minneapolis Police Department warns could soon leave the force unable to respond to emergencies.

Homicides in Minneapolis are up 50 percent, with nearly 75 people killed across the city so far this year. More than 500 people have been shot, the highest number in more than a decade and twice as many as in 2019. And there have been more than 4,600 violent crimes — including hundreds of carjackings and robberies — a five-year high.

But wait!  You can already hear it coming from the usual Leftist sources:  “Correlation is not causation.  We need to take a deep breath and wait until all the facts are in.”

Question:  How dumb do they think we are?  Answer:  Is there a limit?

Minneapolis police say they have struggled to respond. They have faced a surge of officer departures in the wake of Floyd’s death and the outcry against police. In June, a city council majority vowed to defund and dismantle the department and replace it with a new agency focused on a mix of public safety and violence prevention — a move that could go before voters in 2021.

So we’ll soon see whether Minneapolis residents are into collective suicide.

“Since the unjustified and unfortunate death of George Floyd, the city council has engaged in rhetoric that has emboldened criminals, the proof of which is in the unprecedented spike in crime,” said George Saad of southwest Minneapolis, describing himself as an immigrant and a “child of war” who came to the city because of its rich diversity. But now Saad says he feels terrorized in his own community, afraid to walk down the street.

“You guys have had years to address any culture problems within the Minneapolis Police Department,” he said. “You have failed to do so. Instead, you embark on a campaign against your own police department, fighting and demonizing an entire internal city organization instead of making it better.”

Karen Forbes, of South Minneapolis, told council members how bullets burst through her living room wall on a recent night, narrowly missing her head. “I have relived that night many times, hearing the sounds of the bullets hitting my radiator and drywall spraying everywhere,” Forbes said.

Like many during the hearing, Forbes questioned the lack of police officers on the street and blamed the city council for pursuing what she described as a “sociology experiment that obviously doesn’t work.” She and others called for a surge of law enforcement into the city.

We have seen the future of defunding because it’s already here.  The idea that it’s being done to help minorities is one of the more breathtaking lies I’ve seen in decades in public life.  It’s not bringing help.  It’s bringing death.