Law Enforcement
January 27, 2023 — John Hinderaker
I was scheduled to be a guest on Laura Ingraham’s television show tonight, but I was bumped for breaking news from Memphis. On January 7, Tyre Nichols was stopped by Memphis police for what is said to be a routine traffic violation. For some reason, he fled and officers pursued him. One or more “altercations” followed, and Nichols ultimately was transported to a hospital, where he died. Five Memphis police
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October 24, 2022 — Scott Johnson
I’ve banged my head against the wall on the matter of Keith Ellison for 16 years. He is unfit for any public office. He is most unfit for a public office with responsibility for law enforcement. One such office is the position of Minnesota Attorney General. Unfortunately, that is the position he currently holds. His run for the position in 2018 prompted my column “Can Keith Ellison turn lawman?” Ellison’s
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October 7, 2022 — John Hinderaker
The Minnesota State College and University System (“MnSCU”) includes 37 colleges and universities around the state, and trains a large majority of Minnesota’s law enforcement officers. Only you can’t call them “law enforcement” anymore: One of Minnesota’s public university systems has ordered its schools to remove any and all references to “law enforcement.” *** “One of the changes is that law enforcement has to be taken out of everything,” the
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October 7, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday President Biden issued a blanket pardon of all those convicted of marijuana possession under federal law. The White House has posted the text of Biden’s proclamation of pardon is here.The White House has posted Biden’s video statement on the pardon on Twitter (below). Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana. Hear from @POTUS on the three steps he is taking to right these
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August 31, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The White House thinks they have struck gold with their attack on “MAGA Republicans” as “semi-fascist” and all the rest. President Biden’s minders in the daycare operation at the White House are wheeling him out for a primetime campaign speech addressing “the soul of the nation” tomorrow night. The speech is to take place outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia. I am following Politico’s story on the speech here. My working
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August 21, 2022 — Scott Johnson
On Friday United States Attorney for Minnesota Andrew Luger called a press conference to discuss the strategy he is pursuing with other state and federal law enforcement agencies to address violent crime in the Twin Cities. Alpha News has posted the CrimeWatch account of the press conference here. Stephen Montemayor’s longer and more detailed Star Tribune story is here. Both stories reflect telling statements by Luger on the local crisis
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July 18, 2022 — Scott Johnson
John covered our current local cause célèbre last night in “The victim speaks.” You know Minneapolis is suffering another meltdown if attorney Ben Crump is on the scene. While all the facts behind the hours-long standoff that preceded Tekle Sundberg’s death are not yet clear, Crump wants to agitate the mob. Minneapolis Police Department officers gave their PROMISE to Tekle Sundberg's parents that their son's mental health crisis would NOT
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July 17, 2022 — John Hinderaker
The latest cause celebre for leftists in Minnesota is the case of Tekle Sundberg. Sundberg tried to murder a young woman, Cassandra Yarbrough, whom he apparently did not know. Police were called, Sundberg fired repeatedly from within an apartment, there was a standoff that lasted for hours, officers tried to negotiate with Sundberg and brought in family members to try to persuade him to surrender. Under circumstances that are not
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July 16, 2022 — Scott Johnson
I reported on Judge Schiltz’s In re Blue Grand Jury investigation final order yesterday morning as soon as it was released. A copy of the final order is appended to my linked post. The massive investigation described in the order was triggered in part by an illegal leak of grand jury information to the Star Tribune regarding the prospective federal indictment of Derek Chauvin et al. following Chauvin’s state-court murder
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July 15, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Judge Patrick Schiltz (my friend and now chief judge of the Minnesota federal district court) has filed a public order concluding his investigation into the illegal leaks of secret grand jury information preceding the indictment of Derek Chauvin by the Biden Justice Department (embedded below). The leaks formed the basis of stories reported in the New York Times and the Star Tribune. Readers may recall that we have followed the
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July 4, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Riots have been taking place in Akron, Ohio, following the shooting by police of Jayland Walker. The incident occurred in June, but release of police bodycam footage has sparked the riots. The case has made international news. The London Times, for example, headlined Jayland Walker: Plea for calm after Ohio police kill unarmed black man. The other fact that has gotten much publicity is that officers–I believe there were eight
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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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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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April 7, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Two men “of Washington, D.C.” (as they are identified in the prosecutors’ press release) were arrested yesterday for impersonating federal officers in a scheme that appears to have involved efforts to compromise the Secret Service. Michael Balsamo lays out the basic elements of the case in the AP story: Federal prosecutors on Wednesday charged two men they say were posing as federal agents, giving free apartments and other gifts to
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February 18, 2022 — Scott Johnson
No charges have been brought (sealed or unsealed) and no arrests have been made in the massive free lunch fraud that exploded into the local news last month. In previous posts, I embedded copies of the three search warrants whose unsealing made the story public. Based on the warrants, I infer the charges will come. The search warrants also established the existence of assets — “real estate, cars, and other
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February 9, 2022 — Scott Johnson
It turns out that the St. Paul Police Department was seeking to arrest 17-year old Mekhi C. Speed in a pending homicide case when it sought the search warrant that the Minneapolis Police Department executed in the form of a no-knock raid. The raid resulted in the death of Amir Locke, who himself was nothing more than an innocent bystander sleeping with a handgun when the police conducted the raid.
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February 7, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Amir Locke was killed in the course of the execution of a no-knock search warrant by Minneapolis police this past Wednesday. On Thursday evening the police released bodycam footage (in slow-motion and real time) from one of the officers executing the warrant (not the shooter). YouTube has made the video and several local news stories that include it age-restricted. As I write, the brief KARE 11 story below including some
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