The Strib puts faces – and, to a fairly cryptic and inconsistent extent, causes – to the 31 homicides in Saint Paul last year.

Of the 31 victims, two are white, and five are Latino. Of the remaining 26 victims, gang violence is explicitly noted in several incidents.

• Gang members were specifically listed as the killers in three of the blurbs – and the three victims were also apparently gang members. There is no doubt that that number is low –
• Of the remaining 28 homicides, 11 showed (reading between the lines) signs of being gang-related; young men being shot while sitting in cars, or in the middle of drug deals. This omits several that smelled of common street crime – people shot outside bars, in alleys, that sort of thing. It’s a guess, but I”m going to say it’s a good guess.
• 27 of the victims were shot – two of them accidentally, and one by the SPPD in what looked like “suicide by cop”.
• Three, incuding one of the children, were the result of domestic violence.
• Two were children – one killed by blunt force trauma, one from being left in a hot car.
• No arrests have been made in eight (and no mention of an arrest is in one other blurb) of the homicides.
• Mental illness seems to be an explicit part of at least 2-3, including a suicide by cop and good samaritan killed by mentally-ill man.
• Two are white, five are Latino, 26 are black.
• None of murders were deterred, and none of the homicides, were solved by the city’s “resilience director”, or the two-dozen deputy mayors that clog the city payroll. Or by the city’s Tony Soprano-style

Interesting to see if the city triples down on its Carter-era pollyannaism about crime.

Having its police chief focusing on copy-editing the Constitution probably isn’t a good sign.