Monday, March 20, 2006

The Minneapolis Quagmire

If I owned a business in Uptown Minneapolis, I'd be outraged. If I ran a corporation in Minneapolis, I'd be outraged. If I had plans to develop part of Uptown near the location of Saturday night's shooting, I'd be outraged. If I lived in or around Uptown, or Minneapolis in general, I'd be outraged.

I'd be outraged, and I'd get on the phone. Here's some places to start:

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak (612) 673-2100.

Minneapolis City Council - Various numbers, click here.

Call a business owner in Uptown and tell them you don't feel safe spending your money in Uptown. Call the corporate office of a company based in Minneapolis, and tell them you want pressure put on the city "leaders" to take control of the city.

Call Joel Rosenberg and sign up for self-defense training. The adults in this state have given us the ability to put ourselves on equal footing with the criminals. Use that right.

Take your entertainment dollars out of Minneapolis until they clean things up (and they've got a lot of cleaning to do).

The criminal class has virtual free rein of the city. The Minneapolis Police are a first-class organization, but police work by nature is reactive. They can't be everywhere. The problems in Minneapolis are institutional, deeply embeded, and wed to liberal governance. The city "leadship" is adrift in helplessness. Has anyone even heard Mayor Rybak address the problems of crime since spring of 2005? What is Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar up to?

If you care about the city, make your views known. I'm not confident the current regime has the ability to resolve this crisis (do they even know it's a crisis?), but by not acting we've given up.