Talk Radio and City Council Rep: Who killed Tyesha Edwards? The liberals!
I actually learned something listening to the talk-radio shows on Monday.
According to a host of callers filling the airwaves, the Tyesha Edwards shooting in south Minneapolis was inevitable. Inevitable because of long-entrenched liberal policies found on our little patch of prairie.
“These people” and “the bad guys” (KSTP-AM host and Pioneer Press columnist Joe Soucheray’s code for … well, you figure it out) come to our great state from all sorts of less generous places, live off of our taxes, and go all gun-happy because the liberals in Minnesota let them get away with it.
Isn’t this the usual angry-middle-class-neo-conservative line we’re bored with by now? Sure.
But there was a couple of surprise cameo-callers Monday: Minneapolis council member Barb Johnson (Fourth Ward) and Mayor R. T. Rybak, both DFLers.
Rybak’s Tyesha grandstanding can be deconstructed later; for now, let’s look at the city council member.
Barb Johnson phoned in to Ron Rosenbaum’s “The Morning Spin,” a usually level-headed forum on KSTP-AM 1500, to laud a fellow named Scott Johnson. He had penned a column on the shooting that appeared in Sunday’s Pioneer Press. (He and his co-author run this extensive little blog.)
Links on the PiPress web site are fleeting, so I’ll quote a bit from Scott Johnson’s column:
What is shocking, unfortunately, is not Tyesha Edwards' murder, but rather Minneapolis's impotent law enforcement bureaucracy and acquiescent political culture. The city has become a haven for gangsters, a transformation that the municipal authorities have passively endured. The reason for the silence stares us in the face.
The gangsters themselves are largely black, and Minneapolis's political culture is absorbed in a crusade against the reality that blacks are arrested and incarcerated in numbers that substantially exceed their proportion in the general population. …
The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party that has governed Minneapolis from top to bottom for 20 years holds itself out as the supreme protector of the city's minorities, blacks foremost among them.
So there you have it: Those damn liberals killed Tyesha!
What’s notable is that Barb Johnson, an integral part of this “political culture” in Minneapolis, called to agree.
The Fourth Ward rep--who posesses an old-fashioned common sense--has been an interesting case study on the city council this year, as a many city leaders have shown limited interest in fixing the poor relations between Minneapolis police and minorities.
The council member has appeared to favor the police, most notably expressing concern over the prospect of having a federal mediator come to town to ease tensions. She has also questioned key changes to the Civilian Review Authority, the board that handles complaints against the MPD. Time and again, against strong pleas from minority leaders, Barb Johnson has spoken to maintain the status quo on police issues.
But the Barb Johnson who called Rosenbaum’s show Monday went so far as to imply that the police and courts have let the gangs prosper here, and that her own party has been complicit.
Simply put, the council member gripes about gangs flourishing in the friendly confines of Minneapolis, yet she resists efforts to increase police accountability.
Johnson’s stance, I suppose, would be that a federal mediator and a stronger CRA would only hinder our diligent police officers from cleaning up the streets, and that her rant on the radio is consistent with this view. But in truth, police accountability works in mysterious ways, and a strong system can uncover good officers as well as root out bad ones.
Maybe now is the right time--finally--to review police procedures, talk to rank-and-file cops, and establish trust between the MPD and the city's minorities. There's not much more left to lose.
(By the way, the first meeting between city leaders, community reps and the federal mediator is December 10.)
Of course the Edwards shooting was inevitable. But, alas, you really can't blame the DFL. The shooting was inevitable because minority communities have been powerless against the gangs--and police secrecy--for years. This year was one of the worst. That's what they've been trying to tell city leaders all along.
5:22:47 PM 
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