There’s been a lot of chatter about Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman’s announcement last Thursday that his office won’t be asking bail for the following offenses starting next year:
It’s not that Henco is legalizing these activities.
It’s merely providing no direct consequences for skipping trial for accused forgers, felony-level vandals, burglars, porch pirates, kiters, shoplifters, frauds, drug dealers, counterfeiters or welfare cheats.
If they skip trial, a warrant will be issued for their arrest, and if they eventually come into contact with the law, the warrant will be on their record when they are arrested for the next offense that they won’t be charged bail for before skipping trial.
Glad we settled that.
Same people doing this also don’t believe in my right to defend myself.
Image that.
This means starting next year you no longer have property rights in Hennipen county. Rousseau would be so proud!
Not making criminals pay a price for their crimes! What a novel concept! That’s never been tried before!
Once you have decided that the social arrangements that people have developed organically, and written into law, are evil and wicked, where are you, exactly? Where does this new way of doing things come from? What is it meant to accomplish?
If communities developed the idea of crime and punishment based on perpetuating racist and sexist systems of oppression, how do you know that murder isn’t bad?
Eventually you end up with the system Orwell describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Power is its own justification.
So, no bail for these crimes. No bail for the BLAMtifa rioting. Homeless encampments all over Minneapolis. And, as FreschFisch mentions, self defense is not a right to them.
They’ve got the kindling and wood all prepared. Now, to apply an accelerant (Floyd trial, Trump inauguration, etc) and a spark.
My next pandemic project after I finish the book I’m working on may be to design a board game called Minneopoly. Our dysfunctional legal system will have a prominent role.
Aren’t you all glad to be paying for a Better Minnesota™?
if you wanted to invite gangs/cartels to engage in wholesale rapine how would you do this differently?
It all sounds good, but I’m a little confused at how this will work in real life.
Suppose my client – let’s call him Ishmael – is pulled over by police for a rolling stop at a stop sign. Let’s say he is suspected having stolen the car he’s driving. The new policy says the cops won’t arrest him and take him to jail. Instead, they’ll send Summons in the mail telling him when to appear in court.
Suppose my client – being a busy guy and somewhat forgetful – misses his court appearance. In the olden days, the court would issue a warrant for his arrest and, when he got picked up, the judge would set bail to ensure my client would remember his next court date. But under the No Bail policy, will that procedure continue? After all, my client is still Black and poor. He’s still a non-violent offender. They don’t want him cluttering up the jail, taking up space that could be filled with violent offenders. So cut him loose on his promise to appear, for real, no fooling, pinkie-swear?
And if he fails to appear the second time . . . ?
But JD, of course he would fail to appear! Too busy stealing more cars!
And yesterday the Minneapolis City Clowncil voted to cut the MPD budget by $8 million. So, fewer cops to arrest the people who would be released without bail – or to arrest those who have skipped out on court appearances for other crimes. Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?
If those crimes are contained within the laws, isn’t feckless Freeman “taking the law into his own hands?” This will work until the first big Democrat donor is a victim. Then, we’ll either see a. an exception made for that one incident b. public outcry will shame Freeman into changing his mind or c. They go back to business as usual. It would be poetic justice if Freeman was the first carjacking victim of 2021.
We’ve been building “the wall” in the wrong place!
This is part of a Soros-engineered plan. Soros ain’t dumb, he knows that this will make cities unlivable. The real effects you will see are “white flight” and the death spiral of increasing property taxes while city services decline.
So what is the end game?
My guess is that it is to eliminate city funding from local sources, e.g, move city budgets away from traditional property taxes, event & liquor taxes, and event fees, to the state or federal level. In other words, the purpose would be to take taxing powers away from local politicians and residents and place it in the hands of bureaucrats.
I can see why the MPD is doing this–they’ve got a huge exodus of officers and funding–but it strikes me that if you want to see an example of what happens when you let the little stuff slide, “New York City in the 1970s and 1980s” is a prime example. What’s being missed is that when you convict someone of a penny-ante crime, you’ve often just gotten prints and DNA of someone who’s does something far, far worse.
That’s a big reason, really, that you want to be very careful about how much police work you want to “subcontract” to other agencies. There is simply too much to be gained by implementing “broken windows” policing and learning that the squeegee guy is also an armed robber at night.
MO;
In other words, turn every city into a Detroit or Baltimore.