Role-playing games
Ongoing violence reaffirms the necessity of a robust police force.
The Minneapolis Police Department reported that over the weekend of July 25 through July 28 — Thursday through Sunday — three murders and seven other, unrelated shootings occurred in the city. “This weekend we’ve seen an unacceptable level of crime and violence” was how Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara described it at a July 28 news conference.
These violent crimes, coupled with the reality that his department remains critically understaffed (43 percent below the authorized strength of 888 officers), persuaded O’Hara to call an emergency meeting of his command staff and outside law enforcement partners to formulate a plan to supplement law enforcement in the city with additional outside agency assistance.
The increased level of violent crime and O’Hara’s response directly counter the popular notion that crime is down everywhere in Minneapolis. Alternatives to policing, such as citizen violence prevention patrols, online and 311 crime reporting, and specialized response training for behavioral health crisis calls touted by city leaders for several years, haven’t exactly improved safety in Minneapolis.
Minneapolis leaders have been ignoring the recruitment and retention crisis they created in their police department while hoping they could turn around the disastrous crime landscape without a functioning police department. It hasn’t gone well.
And the longer they try to do this without addressing the glaring lack of political support, officers do not want to work in Minneapolis. This makes it more likely to have to accept a “new normal”: uncontrolled and random violent crime in our state’s signature city.
Sadly, it appears citizens are growing weary of crime and the city’s lack of response. Data from the Minneapolis Crime Dashboard indicates that despite violent crime trending up, calls for police service have been trending down since 2019.
As the chart shows, using 2019 as a reference to the “old normal,” violent crime in Minneapolis through the first six months of 2024 remains 28.5 percent higher, while priority one calls for service, or urgent calls, have dropped by 16 percent.
Specific violent crimes all remain significantly higher than the same period in 2019, with murder up 113 percent, robbery up 52 percent, and aggravated assaults up 32 percent.
Those who live, work, or visit Minneapolis deserve more from city leaders to keep them safe. Their reaction to the civil unrest of 2020 was to abandon common sense and govern according to activist voices. City leaders discredited their police department, ruining the most valuable public safety resource they had.
As a result, they helped create a “new normal” of unacceptable violent crime and an exasperated populace.
Things can change for the better, of course, and it’s in everyone’s best interest for Minneapolis to turn things around. City leaders need to immediately stop appealing only to activist voices and demonstrate to all citizens that the city government supports and values the critical role the police department plays in public safety. As O’Hara reiterated in his news conference, “Police are absolutely necessary to try to prevent, respond to, and keep people safe.”