Minneapolis Slides Downhill [Updated]

Minneapolis once had the reputation of being a nice city. That seems, now, like a long time ago in a galaxy far away. These days, the reality is different. This sickening video of a gang of youths viciously brutalizing a man just outside Target Field, where the Twins play baseball, has gone national. It is visual proof of how feral downtown Minneapolis has become:

More and more, violence intrudes on the precincts of normal Minnesotans. Thus, for example, my wife and I attended a Twins game a week ago today. When the game was over, it took forever to get out of the ramp. When we finally got to the street, there was yellow tape everywhere and a police officer directing traffic away from the street and back into the ramp. I rolled down my window and asked the officer what was going on. He gestured behind him and said, “Shooting.”

Or, to take another example, on the last night of the Minnesota State Fair, generally thought of as one of the more wholesome events a family can attend, there was a gang rumble just outside the fair gates at closing time:

As the Minnesota State Fair wound to a close late Monday, chaos unfolded just outside its main gate.

Fights broke out. A 19-year-old woman was gravely injured when she was hit by a vehicle. Then the sound of gunfire sent hundreds of panicked fairgoers fleeing down Midway Parkway into the Como neighborhood. One resident peeked out her window to find three people taking cover behind her lawn furniture.

Police sources have attributed the worst of the violence, including the barrage of bullets that sent three men to the hospital, to rival gangs.

The wounded people were all taken to the same hospital, where fighting again broke out between the gangs. This isn’t your grandfather’s Minnesota.

Authorities admit that violent crime is up in Minneapolis, although they surround that admission with happy talk, which won’t be believed by anyone who actually ventures into the city at night. (The story is the same in urban St. Paul. One night last week, the St. Paul police lacked the manpower to respond to three shootings that happened more or less simultaneously in different parts of the city.)

Minneapolis’s mayor is a young man who worked briefly in my law firm and is obviously not up to the task. Members of the City Council are ridiculously left-wing and totally ineffective. In both Minneapolis and St. Paul, civic authorities are convinced that policemen are the gravest threat to “communities of color,” and therefore law enforcement should be scaled back, or only grudgingly reinforced in response to events like the one you see in the video above.

And so, as liberal values dominate in another urban enclave, the city becomes ever more inhospitable, even unlivable, for law-abiding citizens.

UPDATE: A reader reminds me that I should have mentioned this: “Some Minneapolis candidates say they can envision a city without police.”

Seven City Council hopefuls and two mayoral candidates say in a local voter guide that they can envision a future Minneapolis with no police.

Asked, “Do you believe that we could ever have a city without police?” two mayoral candidates and two incumbents and five serious challengers running for City Council answered “yes.”

Hey, that’s what we need: a city with no law enforcement! Just ask the guy who got the daylights beaten out of him in the video above. The problem with Minneapolis, I’m sure he would tell you, is that we have too many police officers.

Unfortunately, liberal fantasies have real-world consequences.

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