The ideas of social justice, Black Lives Matter, and “racial equity” have gripped our politics and culture since last summer. But, while celebrities, athletes, and politicians continue to spout their cookie-cutter slogans to push their political agenda, the place where it all started continues to reckon with the fallout.
Minneapolis has announced that it will be spending $6.4 million to hire more police officers, a plan that was unanimously approved by the same Minneapolis City Council that had promised last year to abolish the city’s police department. The city will be hiring some 60 new officers at a time when the police department says it has approximately 200 fewer officers than normal.
Minneapolis has been rocked by crime since the city devolved into violent riots following the death of George Floyd. Minnesota’s governor requested $500 million from the federal government to repair the city after riots damaged over 1,500 properties, with approximately 150 buildings lit on fire and two deaths.
Minneapolis became a playpen for activists and media figures. They then turned their focus to national cultural battles and left behind a city overwhelmed by violent crime. Minneapolis had more homicides in the first eight months of 2020 than it did in all of 2019. Violent crime in the city rose 21% when compared to the previous year. The trend hasn’t slowed either: Early 2021 data show a 250% increase in gunshot victims compared to the same time last year.
This is exactly what happened in Ferguson, Missouri. After Michael Brown was killed in the act of assaulting a police officer, the city was left to deal with the destruction caused by its riots. It has had to cut back on nearly every area of its budget except for policing. Ferguson now has a black police chief with a more diverse police department, a black mayor, and a majority-black city council. Yet, city activists insist that nothing has changed. Six years later, all the Black Lives Matter movement has shown in Ferguson is that it can be revisited for retrospective pieces in national media outlets.
The nuance-free racial obsession that emerged from these cities in the wake of police-involved deaths is great for politicians pushing their agenda and celebrities trying to signal just how “woke” they are. But it always manages to ignore the lives of those left living in the cities that became these cultural battlegrounds. Ferguson is not better thanks to this movement, and Minneapolis won’t be either.
