Murderapolis

Minneapolis got about an hour into the new year before
someone got murdered.

The murder happened in a neighborhood that residents are working tirelessly to clean up. Despite their efforts, the people that live there say drugs and prostitution are rampant again. Neighborhood activist Donna Ellringer says police arrest drug dealers around the clock, but she says the courts have been lenient and dealers are often back on the streets in days or less.

"All of a sudden the gangs and drugs come back. In the last three to four weeks, it's been out of control," Ellinger said

Police are still trying to determine if the murder was drug or gang-related. They say no suspects are in custody.

For those of you from outside Minnesota (and those of you in Minnesota who don't pay much attention to the Twin Cities' urban core) - the Phillips Neighborhood is a monument to the failure of fifty years of liberalism. The neighborhood - mostly old, solid homes built from the 1890s to the 1920s - was a respectable working class neighborhood until "Urban Renewal" and the federal government drove I-94 and I-35W into the heart of the neighborhood (their crossroads marks the northwest corner of the neighborhood now), gutting property values and beginning the immense middle-class flight from central Minneapolis that has still not abated.

Then, Minneapolis' socialistic landlord-control laws, and Minnesota's confiscatory rental-property taxes, gave the small landlord a choice - maintain a property properly and lose money hand over fist, or let it decay and cover their mortgage and tax payments.

And Minnesota's welfare system turned the inner city and its newly-undesirable property into warehouses for the poor - while the system's misplaced generosity and myopia imported more poor from around the country. They brought their drug trade and gangs with them...

...and here we are. Another poor schmuck dead in Phillips. The community again cowering in their distressed housing, the city's honest citizens disarmed by a patriarchal government, the liberal judicial system unable to impose order, much less justice, the police mistrusted by both the city's minorities (who feel singled out as well as unprotected) and the whites (who feel disempowered and unprotected, too).

I'm so utterly glad I live in St. Paul.

Posted by Mitch at January 1, 2003 11:02 PM