In August Minneapolis had its

In August Minneapolis had its first race riot in ten years. A Minneapolis police officer and several white reporters were assaulted while Minneapolis officers executed a search warrant at a notorious north Minneapolis crack house. The Minneapolis mayor, chief of police, and city council have reacted with a display of spinelessness that we thought must be most encouraging to the thugs and gangbangers who have made Minneapolis their home. I may be mistaken, but I have yet to see the perpetrators of the assaults identified or apprehended.
The response of Minneapolis’s public authorities has been a disgrace. The most absurd of the responses has been the funnelling of cash to Minneapolis’s own Jesse Jackson, one professional race hustler named Spike Moss who operates as an officer of a nonprofit inner city organization named The City Inc. In time-tested 1960’s fashion, the chief funnelled thousands of dollars to the organization to hire north Minneapolis kids to pick up trash. The Minneapolis city council has now blessed this arrangement.
We have posted every published story regarding the riot because we thought that in many respects it was an omen of ill tidings for Minneapolis. In a sequel whose details are still not clear, and which we have therefore refrained from commenting on, a 19-year-old University of Minnesota football player was murdered by a known gangbanger in downtown Minneapolis shortly after the riot. The University of Minnesota football player was from Detroit. It seemed to us a sickening sign of Minneapolis’s deterioration that that young man had survived what must have been some hard years in Detroit only to lose his life weeks after coming to Minneapolis to go to college on a scholarship.
Years ago many of us learned everything we needed to know about The City Inc., after Minneapolis police officer Jerry Haaf was murdered by associates of a notorious gangbanger named Sharif Willis. In 1992 Officer Haaf was shot in the back as he was eating at the Pizza Shack on Lake Street, one of Minneapolis’s main thoroughfares. In 1994 Willlis was arrested in connection with another offense and was found driving a Mercedes registered to The City Inc., where he then worked. One would think that Willis’s relationship with The City Inc., whatever it was, would forever discredit the organization in the eyes of the chief of the Minneapolis Police Department.
Yesterday a man standing outside the Pizza Shack was shot in the head in an apparent gang-related drive-by shooting. This morning’s Star Tribune has the story.

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