Policing
November 1, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
There’s at least a week’s worth of good news in this one Washington Post article about the backlash against the “defund the police” campaign. However, I think the Post overstates the extent to which Democrats are truly moving away from anti-police views and policies. Let’s start, though, with the good news. It begins in the first three paragraphs: Mayoral candidates across the country are closing out their campaigns pledging to
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October 21, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Having covered the 2019 trial of former Minneapolis Police Officer Mohamed Noor for the murder of Justine Ruskcyk Damond, I attended Noor’s resentencing this morning by Hennepin County District Judge Kathryn Quaintance. When I say “covered,” I mean every day from inside the courtroom at a seat behind Justine’s family that I snagged when the New York Times proved a no-show. Resentencing was necessitated by the Minnesota Supreme Court decision
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October 19, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I wrote here (October 6) and here (October 7) about former Minneapolis Police Department Officer Derek Chauvin’s lack of legal representation on appeal of his conviction of George Floyd’s murder. Chauvin continues to be represented by Eric Nelson in the federal civil rights prosecution brought by the Department of Justice, but Nelson’s representation has terminated in the state court case that convulsed the Twin Cities. I summoned the spirit of
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October 17, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Steve mentioned a bizarre news story out of a small town in Norway, where an apparently deranged individual armed with a bow and arrows killed five people and wounded three others. The case is now generating controversy because police were quickly alerted to the threat, but were unable to stop the murderer because they were unarmed: Norway on Saturday announced it will hold an independent investigation into the actions of
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October 6, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Jeff Sessions has written an excellent article for the New York Post called “Blame woke pols for the nation’s needless spike in murders.” Most of what Sessions says will be familiar to Power Line readers. However, it’s great to have someone of Sessions’ stature publishing these arguments in an outlet with the kind of circulation the New York Post enjoys. Sessions starts by noting that from 2019 to 2020, the
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September 14, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced new rules governing the federal monitors who impose their leftist views of policing on police forces trying to cope with skyrocketing criminality. These monitors exercise the authority of the federal government through consent decrees imposed on localities. Under Donald Trump, the Justice Department wisely stopped pursuing consent decrees. However, the Biden DOJ, under the leadership of BLM-supporting Vanita Gupta and racist Kristen Clarke, is
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September 13, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Nikuyah Walker is the mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia. She was elected to the city council in 2017 on a BLM-style platform and was selected by the council to be mayor in 2018 and 2020. Charlottesville knew what it was getting in Walker, and that’s what it got. She insisted that the city was racist, going so far as to tweet out a graphic poem that compared the “beautiful-ugly” college town
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August 29, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Jonathan Turley, a liberal law professor and criminal defense lawyer, became a hero to some conservatives by virtue of his well-argued articles opposing both impeachments of Donald Trump. In Turley’s latest piece, he comes down hard on Michael Byrd, the police officer who shot and killed Ashli Babbitt on January 6. I don’t think Turley makes much of a case that Byrd’s actions were unjustified. He starts off on the
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August 6, 2021 — Scott Johnson
According to the famous maxim, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. The adage doesn’t apply to Rep. Cori Bush’s support for defunding the police while arranging private security for herself (video below). Bush’s hypocrisy is the tribute that self-regard (extreme) pays to incoherence (shameless), or something like that. And this is the woman who inspired Joe Biden to promulgate the lawless evictions moratorium. CBS News has posted
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July 29, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C., says she will ask the city council to spend $11 million to hire 20 police officers in the next few months and 150 police officers in fiscal year 2022. With homicides and shootings up in D.C., and with George Floyd fever finally starting to break, one can understand Bowser’s decision. But even if Bowser gets the increase, and she may not, it will
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July 22, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Last month, our friend Sen. Tom Cotton delivered an important address on policing and criminal justice in the U.S. The speech, delivered at the Manhattan Institute, was called “Breaking the Crime Wave.” You can read it here. That the U.S. is experiencing a wave of violent crime is beyond dispute. Even the mainstream media is reporting on that crime wave (see below, for example). Some Democrats are even acknowledging its
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July 19, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Over the weekend FOX 9’s Tom Lyden reported the sordid details of DFL state representative John Thompson’s domestic assault charges going back a decade and more. Following the publication of Lyden’s story, the DFL establishment turned on Thompson. Every member of the DFL establishment called in unison for Thompson’s resignation. Since he first appeared on the public scene in the summer of 2020, Thompson has manifested as an obvious racial
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July 18, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I brought the case of John Thompson up to date early yesterday morning in “The mixed-up files of Rep. John Thompson.” I argued for the general importance of his case in the manifestation of the motive force of the Democratic Party. Minnesota Democrats deserve him as their public face. They should be stuck with him good and hard. By the end of the day, however, Minnesota’s Democratic establishment and its
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July 17, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I’ve stayed away from the story of DFL state representative John Thompson’s July 4 wee hours traffic stop by a St. Paul police officer for the past few days. Thompson is a racial hustler who rode his call to burn down Hugo, Minnesota last summer all the way to the state legislature in November 2020. Thompson is the true face of Minnesota’s DFL. He stands for something far larger than
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July 13, 2021 — Scott Johnson
St. Paul police have released the bodycam footage of the July 4 traffic stop of state representative John Thompson. I have embedded it below. The first minute and the last minute capture the interaction. He was driving with a Wisconsin driver’s license at a time when his driving privileges had been revoked as a result of an unmet child support obligation. He was stopped because his car lacked a front
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July 13, 2021 — Scott Johnson
DFL state representative John Thompson is a bully, thug, liar, and race hustler supreme. He made a name for himself threatening to burn down Hugo, Minnesota, in a threatening diatribe outside the home of then Minneapolis police union president Bob Kroll last summer. As a result of his good works, he was elected to the legislature in November 2020 from St. Paul’s East Side. Thompson has held a Wisconsin driver’s
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July 10, 2021 — Scott Johnson
After Ilhan Omar and Keith Ellison, the DFL’s John Thompson must be the most outrageous officeholder ever to disgrace public life in Minnesota. He rode his outrageous 2020 misconduct all the way to the Minnesota House of Representatives this past November. See the Alpha News archives on Thompson conveniently compiled here. Thompson represents something, all right, but it’s not exactly his St. Paul East Side constituents. Let’s see if we
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