Pirate's Cove

It’s easy to be a Principled uber-white liberal when you aren’t confronted with Bad Things. Not so easy when the crime starts rising. Their neighborhood is about middling safe, and surrounded by much higher crime neighborhoods. Aaaaaand….action

A Minneapolis Neighborhood Vowed to Check Its Privilege. It’s Already Being Tested.

When Shari Albers moved three decades ago into Powderhorn Park, a tree-lined Minneapolis neighborhood known as a haven to leftist activists and bohemian artists like herself, she went to work sprucing it up.

She became a block club leader, organizing her mostly white neighbors to bring in playgrounds and help tackle longstanding issues with crime.

On many nights, she banged on the car windows of men who had come to solicit prostitutes outside her door, she said. She kept meticulous notes when dozens of men would gather in a circle for gang meetings in the park across from her house. After each episode, she called the police.

But times have changed. After the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, Ms. Albers, who is white, and many of her progressive neighbors have vowed to avoid calling law enforcement into their community. Doing so, they believed, would add to the pain that black residents of Minneapolis were feeling and could put them in danger.

See, they kept crime in check by utilizing the police and keeping dangerous elements out. Hence the reason their neighborhood isn’t dark blue (should be interesting when Neighborhood Scout updates), but, now they’ll virtue signal.

Already, that commitment is being challenged. Two weeks ago, dozens of multicolored tents appeared in the neighborhood park. They were brought by homeless people who were displaced during the unrest that gripped the city. The multiracial group of roughly 300 new residents seems to grow larger and more entrenched every day. They do laundry, listen to music and strategize about how to find permanent housing. Some are hampered by mental illness, addiction or both.

So, the commitment lasted all of two weeks before being tested.

Their presence has drawn heavy car traffic into the neighborhood, some from drug dealers. At least two residents have overdosed in the encampment and had to be taken away in ambulances.

The influx of outsiders has kept Ms. Albers awake at night. Though it is unlikely to happen, she has had visions of people from the tent camp forcing their way into her home. She imagines using a baseball bat to defend herself.

Not being able to call the police, as she has done for decades, has shaken her.

“I am afraid,” she said. “I know my neighbors are around, but I’m not feeling grounded in my city at all. Anything could happen.”

Welcome to the crazy urban world that Liberalism creates.

In the city where the movement began, residents are not surprised that it is being taken especially seriously in Powderhorn Park, just blocks from Mr. Floyd’s deadly encounter with the police. For decades, the community has been a refuge for scrappy working-class activists with far-left politics. The biggest day of the year, locals often boast, is the May Day parade celebrating laborers.

Who’s surprised that they go for May Day above things like Independence Day, Memorial Day, Christmas, and others?

“I’m not being judgmental,” said Carrie Nightshade, 44, who explained that she no longer felt comfortable letting her children, 12 and 9, play in the park by themselves. “It’s not personal. It’s just not safe.”

Sucks when reality interferes with your Virtue Signaling, eh? Anyhow, there’s plenty of crazy in this piece, you really, really need to read it full. Let’s skip ahead to Category 5 Moonbattery

Last Thursday night, Joseph Menkevich found a black man wearing a hospital bracelet passed out in the elevator of his apartment building two blocks away from the park. Mr. Menkevich, who is white, quickly phoned a community activist but she did not pick up. He felt he had no choice but to call 911, so he did, but requested an ambulance only, not the police.

Right, the best person to call when someone is passed out is a community activist. But, wait! That’s not all!

Mitchell Erickson’s fingers began dialing 911 last week before he had a chance to even consider alternatives, when two black teenagers who looked to be 15, at most, cornered him outside his home a block away from the park.

One of the boys pointed a gun at Mr. Erickson’s chest, demanding his car keys.

Flustered, Mr. Erickson handed over a set, but it turned out to be house keys. The teenagers got frustrated and ran off, then stole a different car down the street.

Mr. Erickson said later that he would not cooperate with prosecutors in a case against the boys. After the altercation, he realized that if there was anything he wanted, it was to offer them help. But he still felt it had been right to call the authorities because there was a gun involved.

Two days after an initial conversation, his position had evolved. “Been thinking more about it,” he wrote in a text message. “I regret calling the police. It was my instinct but I wish it hadn’t been. I put those boys in danger of death by calling the cops.”