"Expecting" Crime In Minneapolis

Like expecting sunshine in San Diego or expecting rain in Seattle, people now expect crime in Minneapolis. This, from an unlikely source, Minnesota Public Radio: "Living with an expectation of crime in Minneapolis".

Some people who live and work in Minneapolis say they have come to expect to encounter crime there.

Minneapolis, Minn. — Minnesota Public Radio surveyed its audience members about the recent shootings and their perceptions of how safe they feel in Minneapolis. Some respondents, like Carissa Tomlinson, say they feel less safe. [Photo courtesy MPR]

You can't buy a reputation, and right now Minneapolis' reputation is unwholesome. In this case, as the numbers will attest, perception is reality.

Tomlinson lives in the Lowry Hill East neighborhood, one of four that overlap the Uptown entertainment district. She says she won't walk around the area at night without pepper spray and her dog, Olive.

"I feel a little safer with her," says Tomlinson. "Although sometimes I wish I had a scary pit bull or something."

Tomlinson's dog is a far-from-ferocious greyhound. One day recently, she walked Olive in broad daylight not far from where she was mugged about a year and a half ago.

The mugging occured around 10:30 p.m., when a man walked up behind Tomlinson and started talking to her. He grabbed Tomlinson's purse and wrenched it away from her after a brief struggle.

A person should be able to walk their dog without worrying about getting accosted. This area is not far from where a liberal associate editor from Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine was mugged, as you can read about here.

So now Mayor Rybak has lost the liberals, who have discovered that violence does not hew to party lines. And as I've said before, Mr. Mayor, if you lose the liberals on crime, you're really in trouble. This includes, by the way, the Red Star.

Tomlinson almost casually mentions that since living here, she's expected to be robbed. She says she's felt that way because at least five people she knows have been robbed, too. But after Michael Zebuhr was killed in an Uptown robbery, Tomlinson says she feels less safe.

"Everybody who's gotten mugged -- it's like they take their purse and it's not really that big of deal," she says. "Maybe there's a gun, which is super-scary. In my case there wasn't. But, it's not violent for the most part. I always felt fairly safe. It's kind of an inconvenience. It was scary, but it's not like being shot. That really scared me a lot."

You expect to get robbed in Mogadishu; you shouldn't expect to get robbed in Minneapolis.

Many good ideas for combatting the filth that has taken over your city have been proposed by readers of this blog and others, Mr. Mayor. You would do well to give them consideration.