by Dean Garrison, DC Clothesline:
So how’s life in Ground Zero of the George Floyd Revolution? Wakanda 2.0 right? [Once nicknamed ‘Murderapolis,’ the city that became the center of the ‘Defund the Police’ movement is grappling with heightened violent crime, CNN, September 25, 2022]:
Marnette Gordon was doing laundry at home in Minneapolis one summer morning last year when a call came from her 36-year-old son.
She figured her son, Telly Blair, was checking in to see if she wanted a soda from a gas station down the street, where he often went for fuel and snacks.
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“Mom, I’ve been shot,” he said. “Call the police!”
Marnette, her other son Tamarcus and his 12-year-old daughter rushed to the gas station from their home in the city’s north side, a part of town long beset by violent crime.
Blair’s family came upon his blue 1986 Chevy Caprice at pump No. 5 — beating police and paramedics by a few minutes, they said — only to find him slumped in his car, bleeding from multiple bullet wounds in his chest. A 17-year-old male in an orange hoodie had fired nine rounds from a handgun into Blair’s car before running off.
While an off-duty nurse in scrubs who’d been at the gas station tried to stop his bleeding, Marnette — a heart-transplant recipient — couldn’t bear to watch and stood at a distance. Telly was her caretaker.
“It was just horrible to see him sitting there, waiting on the ambulance,” she told CNN.
The 12-year-old called 911 while watching her uncle struggle to breathe.
“Oh my God, please,” the girl, who was crying, said to a dispatcher, according to 911 transcripts of the August 9, 2021 shooting obtained by CNN. “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry, hurry, he’s dead, hurry up!”
Telly Blair was among 93 people who were murdered in Minneapolis last year, city crime data shows. That’s just a few shy of the total killings in 1995, when the city earned the nickname “Murderapolis.” (Neighboring St. Paul witnessed 38 murders last year — a historic high.)
After the police murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, Minneapolis became a worldwide symbol of the police brutality long endured disproportionately by Black people. In a kind of Newtonian response, the city became the epicenter of the culturally seismic “Defund the Police” movement. But that progressive local effort fizzled with a decisive referendum last November.
Now, with its police department under investigation by the Department of Justice, the city of 425,000 is trying to find a way forward amid a period of heightened crime that began shortly after Floyd’s death.
That year, the number of murders soared to nearly 80 — dwarfing the 2019 body count of 46. It has cooled somewhat this year, though the amount of killing — and violent crime in general — remains elevated far above 2019 levels and homicides are on pace to surpass the 2020 figure. The reasons why are far from clear.
KG Wilson, a longtime resident of the Twin Cities, said police withdrew from violent neighborhoods in the aftermath of Floyd’s killing — a common sentiment among locals.
“The criminals were celebrating. They were getting rich,” he said. “They were selling drugs openly.”
