Where Have We Heard This?

Yesterday's Strib editorial asks for something we plainly need...:

Along with more enforcement, plainer talk is required and deeper questions must be asked if violence is to be reversed.

So far so good.

Why, for example, did crime increase 10 times faster last year in Minneapolis than in St. Paul (a city that suffered similar budget cuts)? Why is violent crime one-third less likely in St. Paul than in Minneapolis? Is there a correlation between a surge of teen pregnancies in Hennepin County in the early 1990s and today's crime trends?

It's a start!

Let's keep asking the tough questions.

• That epidemic of illegitimate births in the 1990's - why did that happen? And before answering that, let's take a step back and think bigger; what led to Minneapolis having a much bigger-than-average population of poor post-adolescents, mostly hailing from impoverished families?
• What set of policies could have possibly led Minneapolis to simultaneously deal with the legacies of boundless, unlimited subsidy of poverty and a too-small, underbudgeted police department (in a city that nonethless levies very high taxes) and an incarceration rate for repeat felons that is a laughingstock nationwide?

What, oh what, policies indeed?

The Strib:

Why is crime rising far faster in Midwestern cities than in the South or on the coasts? What's the role of methamphetamine? Of family dysfunction? Of popular culture?

As we said last Sunday, Minneapolis is a city headed rapidly in both good and bad directions. The renewal of its cultural venues is impressive, as is the investment in luxury housing. But the jobs picture is bleak and poor neighborhoods are struggling. "I don't recognize much of the city I grew up in," City Council President Barbara Johnson lamented this week. These new crime numbers make even more urgent the need to reverse the downward spiral so that the whole city can once again claim its role as one of the nation's best urban places.

Yeah.

As long as it doesn't involve looking at the party, and the one-party machine, behind the curtain.

Leftybloggers have criticized me for blaming Minneapolis' crime wave on Amy "A-Klo" Klobuchar. They're right and wrong; I blame Senate candidate Amy Klobuchar for being a dilatory, indifferent prosecutor in a city that needs a Rudy Giuliani. But Klobuchar is just a symptom - the creation of a one-party political machine that has been setting Minneapolis up for this moment for generations. By giving a bottomless subsidy for poverty (including an unquestioning subsidy of the illegitimate childbirth that documentably the criminals of tomorrow) and systematically prioritizing its spending anywhere but law enforcement.

I almost laughed in noting that last point in the editorial:

Mayor R.T. Rybak's pledge to add 71 officers by summer's end still leaves a force far too small to cover both the response to crime and its prevention. A truly proactive department requires many more officers. For example, New York's police force is proportionally 2½ times larger than Minneapolis' for a city with a crime rate that's one-half lower.

This is, of course, a result of decisions the city made 20 and 30 years ago. Minneapolis has the tax burden of a much larger city, and the police force of a smaller one, thanks to calls the city's DFL machine made a generation ago.

The real answer to crime in Minneapolis - not only this current wave, but the next one and the one after that - is to smash the DFL machine in Minneapolis and elect a government whose priorities include protecting its citizens and making the real tough choices about the kind of future the city wants; that includes the choice between unquestioning subsidy of poverty (a choice Minneapolis made 50 years ago and clings to for dear life) or promotion of achievement.

The Strib - like the DFL machine for which it so shamelessly panders - doesn't want to ask you those tough questions...

Posted by Mitch at June 15, 2006 07:18 AM | TrackBack