A City’s Inexorable Decline

Over the past year, Minneapolis has joined Chicago, Portland, Baltimore, Seattle, Detroit and St. Louis as cities whose futures look bleak on account of out-of-control crime. Scott wrote this afternoon about the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s tentative and belated acknowledgement that the city’s residents need to support their police department rather than interfering with attempted arrests. That would be a start, I guess.

But Minneapolis’s decline is precipitous and the hour is late. The Star Tribune itself reported this morning that Minneapolis is “bringing in outside help” from both state and federal agencies after four more people were murdered over the weekend.

Ten people were shot late Saturday night as the bars were closing in downtown Minneapolis. Two men got into a verbal altercation, pulled guns and started shooting. Along with the innocent victims, one of the shooters died, while the other is under arrest:

Police said shots erupted at bar closing time when two men got into a “verbal confrontation” on the crowded sidewalk. In addition to the two killed, eight people were injured by the gunfire.

The other suspected shooter, a Bloomington man, 23, was arrested and booked on suspicion of murder.

I will hazard a wild guess that this guy should have been in prison on account of prior offenses. Lax sentencing is a huge problem in Minnesota, as liberal judges have turned our criminal justice system into a revolving door. More:

Hours before the mass shooting, police responding to a ShotSpotter activation in the city’s Jordan neighborhood about 8:40 p.m. found a car-crash victim with gunshot wounds. The man, whose name has not been released, died a short time later.

That same night, there was a nonfatal shooting at the CC Club in south Minneapolis.

Sunday, too, brought another death. Police suspect a man, whose name has not been released, was shot in the city’s Hawthorne neighborhood. As people tried to rush him to the hospital to get treatment for his wounds, the car flipped, police said.

The vast majority of Minneapolis’s murders are of blacks, by blacks, and many are gang-related. Yet the City Council natters on about “police violence.” In tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, Heather Mac Donald describes the bleak Minneapolis landscape:

Minneapolis homicides between Jan. 1 and last week were up 108% compared with the same period in 2020; shootings were up 153%, and carjackings 222%. The crime increase began after Floyd’s death and has never let up. Nor has the assault on law enforcement that began with the arson destruction of the Third Precinct building on May 28, 2020. Officers are routinely punched, kicked and hit with projectiles.

There is a human dimension to these statistics:

Messrs. Sharpton and Crump didn’t visit North Memorial Health Hospital, where two recent victims of a yearlong explosion of violence in Minneapolis are on life support. On April 30 Ladavionne Garrett Jr., 10, was riding in a car with his parents when a gunman opened fire. A bullet pierced Ladavionne’s head; doctors put him in a medically induced coma and removed part of his skull to relieve swelling on the brain. On May 15, 9-year-old Trinity Ottoson-Smith was jumping on a trampoline at a friend’s house when bullets fired from a passing car struck her in the head. She is also in critical condition at North Memorial, in the room next to Ladavionne’s.

Nineteen children in Minneapolis have been shot this year, an increase of 171% over the same period in 2020. Their relatives wonder where the protesters are. “Why ain’t nobody mad about a 10-year-old, my grandson, fighting for his life?” asked Sharrie Jennings, Ladavionne’s grandmother, at a May 17 mayoral event. “Because a cop didn’t shoot him, is that why?” Ms. Jennings warned of “a deadly summer” for kids if the mayor and police chief don’t “step up.” Later that day, Aniya Allen, 6, was caught in a shootout between rival gangs while in her mother’s car. Aniya died on May 19.

This increase in violence can only be due to the Black Lives Matter movement and the anti-police agitation that left-wing politicians and activists have eagerly promoted. There is, of course, no accountability in the liberal press, but who knows? There might be accountability at the polls in 2022.

But that’s not all. Above and beyond Minneapolis’s appalling crime statistics, there is a broader breakdown in social norms, in law and order. What used to be unthinkable has, over the past year, become not only thinkable but a daily reality.

Thus, lawless elements are drag racing on the city’s streets, cheered on by big crowds and apparently immune to arrest, as law enforcement retreats in response to hostility from the local political establishment. One such drag race recently culminated in a fiery crash in a tunnel used daily by many thousands of Minnesotans that was captured on camera. A couple of people burned alive.

In addition to drag racing, there is something called “burnouts.” Late last Saturday night, a big crowd–it looks to me like a couple thousand people–gathered in South Minneapolis to watch cars doing burnouts at a major Minneapolis intersection, Lake St. and Lyndale Avenue. This is not a slum, but rather the heart of “Uptown,” which historically has been one of Minneapolis’s main entertainment and retail districts. And yet large numbers of lawless individuals illegally blocked traffic on both major thoroughfares, in both directions. The festivities ended only when a car doing a burnout, whatever that is, inadvertently skidded into the crowd, sending at least one victim to a hospital. Personally, I find this video more shocking than an increase in gang violence:

VIDEO captured early this morning in Uptown Minneapolis at Lake St. & Lyndale Ave. S. – A group of drivers shut down the intersection doing burnouts, and reportedly struck a pedestrian in the group of onlookers.

Full video was posted on Facebook here: https://t.co/qGaROlSrDN pic.twitter.com/3beGhqbqnM

— MN CRIME 🚨 (@MN_CRIME) May 23, 2021

A certain level of shared assumptions and values is necessary for any society to exist successfully. I don’t think that has been an issue in the U.S. since the end of the Civil War, until now.

Today, our establishment–the Biden administration and the federal Administrative State, state and municipal governments in places like Minnesota, the press, academia and K-12 education, the entertainment industry, most of big business including Big Tech, and other establishment forces, are all aligned behind an agenda that is deeply divisive. Not only divisive, but essentially anti-American.

Has any country ever survived, let alone prospered, when led by elites that hate their own country? I doubt it. The City of Minneapolis is a pretty good guide to where the Left’s anti-American, anti-civilization policies are taking us.