Crime
June 13, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Nothing so fully exposes the dream world of the left, in which good intentions and sentiments are thought sufficient to make reality bend to their will, than the enthusiasm for “re-imagining policing” that went along with the “Defund the Police” mania post-George Floyd. If we just “re-imagine” something, it will happen! We don’t even need to close our eyes and click our heels! And one of the leading ideas was
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June 12, 2022 — John Hinderaker
A bipartisan group of senators have announced an agreement on gun legislation. I am not sure whether their deal has been reduced to legislative language, and I don’t know whether it will get through the Senate, or whether Democrats in the House will vote for it. (If I were a Democrat, I would think that the deal is extremely weak, and its main effect may be to take gun control
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June 12, 2022 — John Hinderaker
There are a number of reasons for our skyrocketing crime rate–the Black Lives Matter movement and George Floyd hysteria are obvious culprits–but one obvious factor is that we do not punish crime severely enough. When criminals are let go, they tend to commit more crimes. My colleague David Zimmer created this simple chart for our state, Minnesota. It shows the dramatic relationship between fewer incarcerations and more crimes–specifically, serious (Part
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June 10, 2022 — Steven Hayward
As noted here yesterday, the Washington Post decided to boot out an entitled Millennial, which comes in the same week that San Francisco voters booted out a woke prosecutor, and we know that Netflix has told its own staff that anyone who doesn’t like offerings like Dave Chapelle or Ricky Gervais might want to seek employment elsewhere (and then cancelled a planned children’s show based on the “work” of Ibram
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June 10, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Alpha News reporter Liz Collin rode along with law enforcement — undercover officers from the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office Carjacking Auto Theft Team — for a look at the hot rod/street racing burnouts and getaways that have become a deadly threat all over Minneapolis and St. Paul (video below). The name of the unit denotes the frequent use of stolen cars in the burnouts. As Liz reports, although the street
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June 8, 2022 — John Hinderaker
The Democrats should be held accountable for last night’s attempt on the life of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Most notably, of course, Chuck Schumer issued a fatwa against Kavanaugh and Justice Neil Gorsuch, which last night’s would-be assassin apparently attempted to execute. But that’s not all. The GOP’s communications staff reminds us of the Democrats’ shameful history of encouraging violence against conservative Supreme Court justices: A man was just arrested outside
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June 8, 2022 — Steven Hayward
As we know from the long-ago Thomas Frank book, Kansas is a red(state) hot mess, but what’s the matter with San Francisco that it recalls its celebrity progressive district attorney? Let me give you a two-word hint: “Dirty Harry.” No, I’m not making this up. The late film critic Richard Grenier remarked that Dirty Harry was the first Hollywood film of that era that “talked back to liberalism.” But Dirty
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June 8, 2022 — Scott Johnson
In today’s feelgood election story, San Francisco’s Soros-approved District Attorney Chesa Boudin decisively lost his recall election after a mere two and a half years in office. The outcome was decisive. Sixty percent of 125,000 votes were cast in favor of Boudin’s booting. Recall is a particularly good word in this case. He was a defective prosecutor. Among his innovations was the elimination of cash bail, the nonprosecution of a
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June 4, 2022 — John Hinderaker
I haven’t written much about the latest round of gun control hysteria, mostly because I have said everything I have to say on that topic many times over the years. The liberal solutions to mass shooting incidents, which are very rare, are every bit as silly and ineffective as their solutions to crime in general, which is ubiquitous and therefore vastly more important. Defunding the police makes about as much
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June 4, 2022 — John Hinderaker
The City of Minneapolis, that is. Not too many years ago, Minneapolis was known as a safe place. But that seems like another galaxy at this point. Last night, a gun battle broke out on Fraternity Row at the University of Minnesota. I don’t think the criminals were frat brothers. You can hear the gun battle in this surveillance video, from an alley that I take it is behind the
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May 30, 2022 — John Hinderaker
The latest school shooting incident has prompted–indeed, prompted before the victims had even been buried–the usual stale anti-gun proposals. Once again, Democrats are pushing for a ban on “assault weapons,” by which they mean semiautomatic rifles that don’t have wooden stocks. My Marlin 60 has a wooden stock, so it is safe from the Democrats. It is a classic semiautomatic rifle that fathers often give their sons as a 15th
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May 26, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Barack Obama remembers George Floyd on the second anniversary of his passing (tweet below). He doesn’t want to let our current focus on the Uvalde massacre distract us from attention to the anniversary and the shibboleth of “reimagining policing.” Obama puts me in mind of John Lennon: “Reimagine there’s no police. It’s easy if you try.” If you visit Minneapolis, by the way, you won’t have to do much in
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May 26, 2022 — Scott Johnson
As reporters ascertain what happened during the tragic school shooting in Uvalde, we have more to process. The Associated Press has reconstructed events outside the school during the shooting before and after the heroic Border Patrol agent entered the building. The AP story is “Onlookers urged police to charge into Texas school.” The story opens: Frustrated onlookers urged police officers to charge into the Texas elementary school where a gunman’s
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May 25, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Salvador Ramos’s evil rampage in Uvalde, Texas has had the inevitable consequence: it was politicized within minutes by Democrats calling for more gun control. Michael Moore, at least, was honest. He said the Second Amendment should be repealed. That, one suspects, is what many Democrats want, but most aren’t bold enough to say it. Instead, they beat around the bush, like Joe Biden who blamed the Uvalde murders on the
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May 23, 2022 — John Hinderaker
The FBI has released a report on “active shooter incidents” in 2021. The report is interesting, in part because it documents a sharp rise in such incidents after Joe Biden’s inauguration: To be fair, there was also a smaller increase in active shooters in the last year of the Trump administration. What is the cause of the current increase, a doubling of active shooter incidents since 2019? The only possibility
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May 17, 2022 — Scott Johnson
John Kass has posted a new podcast with the invaluable Heather Mac Donald on the war on cops, Chicago edition. “Everything the public thinks it knows about race and policing in this country, reverse it, and you’re likely to get the truth,” she said. Kass comments that Chicago Mayor Lori “lightweight” Lightfoot has turned over the downtown to the Black Lives Matters rioters. And now, with mobs cruising the Loop
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May 13, 2022 — Scott Johnson
I haven’t seen Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules yet and can’t comment on it, but we have our very own mule in Minnesota. We have a pack of them, but I am thinking of the just-convicted mule Muse Mohamud Mohamed. Last year Mohamed testified before a grand jury conducting in an ongoing federal investigation of Minnesota’s system of “agent delivery” of absentee ballots He was convicted this week on two counts
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