The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports carjackings have skyrocketed in 2020. They’re up a “staggering” 537% over last year.
Over the past two months, Minneapolis police have logged more than 125 carjackings in the city, a troubling surge that authorities had largely linked to small groups of marauding teens. But an increasing number of adults have been arrested in recent weeks for the same crime.
Within a one-hour period Saturday morning, police reported three separate carjackings in southeast Minneapolis, including one where an elderly woman was struck on the head. Such attacks are up 537% this month when compared with last November.
James Lileks described one carjacking in harrowing detail earlier this week.
Minneapolis has blazed the rhetorical trail on defunding police over the past half year, though its actual cuts have been more modest than, say, radical Austin, Texas, which cut a whopping $143 million from its police budget and canceled upcoming police cadet classes. Minneapolis is looking at cutting about $8 million
The rhetoric matters. Police in Minneapolis and elsewhere across the country are demoralized after being demonized relentlessly for months. Many are walking off the force and won’t be replaced anytime soon. Why put your life on the line when your city’s elected officials not only do not have your back, they’re openly stabbing you in the back?
After spending decades reversing the extreme crime rates of the 1990s, cities like Minneapolis see crime surging again. Democrats who control those cities have no answers that won’t just make crime worse. And it will get worse.
All of this was predictable. In fact, I predicted it when “defund the police” became a thing across the country.
The title of a piece I published here on July 2 was “‘Defunding’ Police Will Lead to More Violent Crime, But Don’t Ask the Mainstream Media.” Media totally abdicated its responsibility to report anything fairly or honestly with regard to the defund movement. Media didn’t report its goals, its origins, where it was likely to lead, or anything else at the time. Media failed to report that majorities of about 80% across all demographics oppose defunding police. Big Tech didn’t flag or censor the defund movement for inciting violence, which it obviously was and still is. “Defund the police” is destroying cities such as Minneapolis.
Before that piece, I wrote about New York City’s murder surge. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio led defunding the city’s police. Before that, back on June 8, I took a look at the history of violent crime in America and why we were likely to see more of it as the defund movement took off. Predicting that demoralizing and chopping police would lead to more crime was probably the easiest prediction of my entire career. But no one in the mainstream media made the same obvious case.
Our cities are getting what they voted for, unchecked Democrat power, and they’re getting it good and hard. Along with a crime surge, they’re getting arbitrary and often politically-motivated shutdowns of small businesses, and of schools, the latter powered more by the teachers’ unions relentless demands for power than by the science, which clearly states and has stated for months that children are not likely conduits to spread COVID.
The school closure is hurting our children: In Houston, Texas’ largest school district, a whopping 42% of students are failing at least one class, according to the Houston Chronicle. Houston is, of course, Democrat-run. Houston’s schools have been on remote learning for months, but few of its 215,000 students seem to be learning.
This will lead to an increase in the dropout rate, which will in turn lead to more crime. Houston, at least, hasn’t defunded its police. It’s better run than Austin, which has, and led the nation in the rate of increase in violent crime earlier this year.
Portland and Seattle are basket cases and may be beyond saving at this point.
Returning to Minneapolis, police didn’t even track carjackings as a separate statistic until this fall because they were so infrequent. Now they’re almost unavoidable and they’re spread all across the city.
MPD didn’t specifically track this type of crime until Sept. 22 because they were so infrequent. Previous cases fell under the larger umbrella of robberies and auto theft. The agency created a new coding system after the summer months yielded an unusually high number of attacks.
A retroactive count by analysts determined that Minneapolis has seen at least 375 carjackings this year — including 17 last week. That overall tally is more than three times higher than 2019.
It’s going to get worse until sanity prevails. When that will happen is anyone’s guess. Voters in cities such as Minneapolis will have to vote their cities’ destroyers out of office and replace them with people who have some contact with reality. For that to happen, media in those cities will have to report what is actually happening. City councils will have to hear and respond to voices other than the far-left radicals who proposed defunding police, without any conscience for the inevitable consequences. Local media will have to report all this accurately. The Star-Tribune has started, about six months too late and long after the trajectory of crime was obvious.
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