Minneapolis has long seen itself as a backwater little brother to left-wing cities like San Francisco and Seattle. Now, for the first time, Minneapolis is in the vanguard, and its City Council is taking full advantage of the opportunity. The Daily Mail–this is what it means to be famous!–headlines: “Minneapolis City Council announces its intention to ‘dismantle’ the police department…”
Nine of the council’s 12 members appeared at a rally in a city park Sunday afternoon and vowed to end policing as the city currently knows it.
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Council Member Jeremiah Ellison promised that the council would ‘dismantle’ the department.
Jeremiah Ellison is Keith Ellison’s son. He has pledged his loyalty to the violent Fascist organization Antifa. Without a police force, I suppose Antifa would have free rein.
Mayor Jacob Frey was booed mercilessly for saying that he was “not for abolishing the entire police department.” Members of the City Council aren’t making the same mistake.
Naturally, Ilhan Omar is getting into the act:
At another protest on Saturday, Rep. Ilhan Omar declared ‘it’s time to disband the Minneapolis Police Department’.
‘I will never cosign on funding a police department that continues to brutalize us and I will never stop saying, not only do we need to dis-invest police but we need to completely dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,’ she said.
‘The Minneapolis Police Department is rotten to the root,’ Omar continued. ‘And so when we dismantle it we get rid of that cancer and we allow for something to rise. And that reimagining allows us to figure out what public safety looks like.’
It is all rather mystical, with a lot of references to “community policing.” But the Minneapolis Police Department has been promoting community policing initiatives for as long as I can remember. What will be different this time?
Well, it would be different if the city actually abolished its police department and relied on heavily-armed citizens to defend themselves against criminals. But of course that isn’t going to happen. One of my daughters summed up the dialectic very well, I think, in a text:
They keep saying police reform doesn’t work and then saying “defund police” and when people are like wtf they then say “well that’s not what we meant” and list police reforms instead.
One thing we can be sure of is that budget priorities will be revised to steer more money to Democratic Party allies: fat cat diversity consultants, well-heeled “community” activists, social workers and the like. The Democrats have no intention of letting a good crisis go to waste.
UPDATE: A friend emails: “Perhaps Minneapolis should change its name to Altamont. ‘Community Policing’ worked so well there.”
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