Enter Mayor Hodges, exit Chief Harteau

In “The loud noise heard round the world,” I wrote that the “loud noise” that the shooting of the unamred and pajama clad healer Justine Damond by Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor opens a window onto the sick culture that reigns in Minneapolis. What a crew. Idiot mayor Betsy Hodges perfectly represents it.

Running for reelection this year, Hodges made her presence felt today. Hodges addressed the shooting crisis by firing Police Chief Janeé Harteau. Hodges declared that she had lost confidence in Harteau’s ability to “lead us further.”

How can this be? It was only earlier this year that Harteau came in at number 22 on Fortune’s list of “World’s 50 greatest leaders.”

Harteau was on vacation at the time of the shooting. She held the press conference yesterday afternoon upon her return to town. She offered no information beyond that which had previously been made public by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, although she did deflect fault for the shooting from departmental policy and training. That’s what a great leader does.

Minneapolis’s idiot mayor belongs on some such list of great leaders along with Harteau. Back in 2013, the Star Tribune plucked Hodges from the 35-candidate field seeking the mayoralty. The Star Tribune’s endorsement must have carried a lot of weight under the circumstances. “[Hodges] was working at a New Mexico home for the mentally ill in 1992 when three Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King,” wrote the gurus of the Star Tribune editorial board, “and the event sparked her interest in racial inequalities and public service.”

Which reminds me. The Star Tribune is itself an indispensable component of Minneapolis’s culture of left-wing conformity masquerading as tolerance and good will. As the city struggles to understand the killing of Justine Damond, the Star Tribune has yet to confide its views beyond a bland compendium of platitudes and misdirection: “This incident can bring the community together, in a united search for how to prevent such tragedies, or it can further divide along racial and class lines. Let us make a concerted effort toward the former.”

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