Seriously? Come on man!
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is a man who wanted to kiss up to the Black Lives Matter movement tearing his city apart while simultaneously distancing himself from their more extreme efforts such as “defund the police department.”
When that demand was made of him in the middle of a hostile crowd he had been kissing up to that day, to his credit, Frey said no, resulting in his being booed out of the area. What he actually did, however, resulted in rules being placed on the police that tied one hand behind their back.
As covered by CBS affiliate WCCO-TV, Frey threw down restraining orders against the Minneapolis PD which forced them to seek authorization from the chief when using crowd control weapons, including tear gas. With trained seals within the department’s leadership clapping along with this, and city council members openly planning to dismantle the Minneapolis police department, things were looking bad for the city.
And this is what resulted:
WCCO-TV reported that the mayor is seeing the end result of even the mere calls to defund the police. During a community gathering where the city mourned the death of seven people just this Sunday, Frey along with Pastor Dale Hume were asked about the rise in crime and both agree that talking about defunding the police was a bad idea:
“The violence needs to stop, its unacceptable. People deserve to feel safe in their neighborhood, they deserve to be able to send their kids out to the sidewalk to play and to recreate without bullets flying by. That’s unacceptable. We should be holding these perpetrators accountable,” Frey said.
The mayor is hoping for a both/and approach to tackling crime.
“It’s going to take a very comprehensive effort. Yes, it includes safety beyond policing, and it includes police. And, you know, I’m one that has been working lock step with our Chief [Medaria] Arradondo, and I’m calling on the council members to try to work with him as well,” Frey said.
“To people who think that the easy solution to this is defund the police, when you live here and something like this happens, you can obviously see that is not the solution,” Hume said.
Mayor Frey agrees.
“It’s just the reality of the solution, you know. When you make big, overarching statements that we’re going to defund or abolish and dismantle the police department and get rid of all the officers, there’s an impact to that,” Frey said. “Do we need massive change? Yes we do. We need accountability and culture shift within our department, and we need police.”
Does Frey think the Minneapolis PD needs “massive change?” Probably not massive. Making a few changes to training and situational awareness for officers may be in order, but what massive changes is he talking about? It’s an awfully vague statement to make and sounds more like someone trying to appease a group of people.
If cities like Minneapolis are going to get right, they need to stop trying to kowtow to people who can’t be appeased. Police are necessary, the ability for citizens to defend themselves is necessary, and if Minneapolis became a city where crime isn’t tolerated and has real consequences, then you’d see a dramatic change in how people behave there. It’s no mystery that the worst riots happened in cities where leadership was afraid to disagree with the rioters, it only caused more riots.
In order for society to function, law and order have to be established. It seems Frey knows what he has to do, he just has to find the will to do it. That means angering a lot of the hard-left leaders within the city, but he needs to remember he doesn’t answer to them, he answers to the people, and the people are being abused, intimidated, and killed by the people he’s trying to appease.
