Riot Updates: Things Calming Down

Last Monday, I shared a big update about what had been happening around Minneapolis and St. Paul over the previous week. And honestly, last Monday is when things started feeling a little less dangerous around our area. As I noted in that post, I got about 3 hours of sleep on Saturday night, and then about 2 hours on Sunday night. But things were quieting down on that Monday 10 days ago.

Still, all last week, I've been leaving an extra yard light on. I've been bungee-cording our 2 gates shut (you can undo it in about 10 seconds, but someone looking to cause trouble would maybe just decide to move on). I've been putting my trash and recycling bins in the garage (our recycling company actually had to send out messages sayings "we will start picking up at 6:30 a.m." to let people know when they'd have to be up and have their recycling out). And I've been keeping my car in the garage (in the summer, my stall is basically overrun with scooters and fun outdoor toys, but I've been squeezing it in every night). I've been keeping the extra yard light on, but I stopped doing everything else after this past weekend - so I kept it up for another 6 days after my last big "update" post.

Here are a few things I’d like to share from here in St. Paul:

A friend’s FB post. SOOO sadly true. When the helicopters stopped
being a regularity mid-week last week, it was almost strange.


Video after video and report after report of police overstepping. This was video
of a police car driving through a crowd and just pepper-spraying as he went.


And more confirmed reports of lots of “outsiders”
coming in to be part of or to take advantage of the madness.


My “neighborhood watch” was really watching out for (and finding) vehicles without plates.




Watching out for these guys too.


Post from a former co-worker. (He's referring to a militia/paramilitary group.)


Some people claimed these things weren't happening. But they were. (Maybe not
as much as people had been concerned about, but they WERE happening.)




A little humor. (It’s “gray duck” here in MN.)

It’s tricky to talk about this, because I don’t want to imply that *every* bad thing that has happened has been because of “outsiders.” Because that's obviously not true. But at the same time, that’s all I’ve seen. When I was out making some 4 a.m. photos last week, I came back to my car to find a car with Iowa plates had pulled up in front of me and was stealing wire (note the wire coiled up on top of his trunk):

A middle-aged white guy on the 2nd floor of a burned down
6 story building stealing what he can (presumably to sell).

Then a funny thing happened to many people (myself included). We were paranoid about everything. And everyone. I had 911 typed into my phone and was ready to call because of a car “acting strange” across the street from my house. (Surprise: it ended up being nothing). This post on one of our neighborhood pages sums it up well:

(“Kim’s” is a Chinese restaurant.)




This is a real level-headed guy too.


A close-up and lightened version of his photo, showing the
temporary paper work. (I blurred some of it out.)

There have been more and more reports of police overstep, including journalists being targeted by the police and being wrongfully arrested and/or assaulted. There were 328 “press freedom violations” in the US in just over the course of a week at the end May and beginning of June, whereas there were only 150 in all of 2019. Yikes.

Related:

Slashing parked car tires to avoid “vehicles driving dangerously and at high speeds?” Yeah, OK.


Not surprisingly the police and state patrol didn’t say anything
about this until video surfaced that caught them in the act.

Allllll of this lead to the MPLS City Council voting to disband the police department. That sounds like anarchy, but it doesn't just involve scrapping the police.

That last line is what people don't seem to understand.
(I didn't understand that until I researched it.)




A post from a FB runner/dad living in Mpls.

I have to admit that I'm super curious how this will work out in Mpls, and I'm happy that I'm living across the river in St. Paul when it does. But this is not a bad thing to want to try after all the tactics mentioned above, the fact that officer complaints are on the rise, the idea that the police union head thinks it's appropriate to be fighting to get these 4 officers their jobs back vs doing anything else right now, and the simple fact that the cop who held his knee on the back of George Floyd's neck for 9 minutes until he was dead was "training in" 2 of the 3 police officers with him at that very moment even though he's had 17+ complaints filed against him over the years. (Two of those requiring disciplinary action.) My point being: is a person with a history like that someone who should be routinely "training in" new recruits? Clearly, there are plenty of reasons for Mpls to want to try something drastic/new with their policing.

And Mpls isn't the first place to have done this: I read up on it here, here, and here. Take a look if you're curious. It's not just saying "bye" to the police, but (as the the last image said so well) more like hitting "the reset button on policing and creating a system that works for them." That's not a bad thing.

Here was my first big post from last Monday if you missed it.