Left as an exercise to the reader

In the early days of the pandemic, there were videos coming out of China showing people collapsing in the streets. Why hasn’t that happened here?

Waiting

The weather has been very hot and humid the past few days; we are ready for a break from the heat. There were several protests over the weekend.  The Minneapolis City Council promising to eliminate the Minneapolis Police Department probably is going to do more damage to the city’s tax base than the rioting and looting did. It was surreal to see them saying this with violent protests still going on all over the country, but for what’s going on here at this point, it is getting near the end of the psychological opportunity to shove through such a radical change. It bears repeating that relations between the MPD and various city factions have long been strained and hostile.  Also, the characters of the different neighborhoods can vary quite widely, and having “community policing” that presumably would include more neighborhood-level input and oversight seems appealing to many.  I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if some neighborhoods have begun to look into the feasibility of legally separating themselves from the city.

The 3rd Precinct building that was abandoned, looted, and burned had been designed and built as an imposing fortress, overlooking a commercial area that is more on the scale of a village crossroads.  That exaggerates the difference in physical scale, but not the emotional impressions. I always felt unsettled when we drove past it. It seemed to belong to an occupying force. The rioters, most of them from outside the neighborhood, certainly treated it that way. Not many people are going to miss it.

Agenda revealed

Some on the left have been using the law enforcement responses to the protesting and rioting to propel calls to Abolish the Police, saying that the cops are violent thugs, and that the social problems like mental illness and homelessness and drug addictions that we have been leaving for the police to handle should be addressed through nonviolent social interventions. Minneapolis City Council members have been talking about this, and about the new programs that they want to create.

But addressing social problems top-down through government intervention maximizes the resources needed, while minimizing the effectiveness of their utilization. The Bible very strongly says that this should happen from the bottom up:  personal responsibility, then family members caring for each other, on up through neighbors, extended family, local worshiping community, city, clan, tribe, nation. The main job at the higher levels is to protect the lower levels from predation and to strongly discourage behavior that is obviously dysfunctional. At the lower levels, close connections between people motivate them to cooperate and help each other, which minimizes the need to draw from the resources of the broader community, and so maintains overall stability and sustainability.

That’s not what the Abolish the Police people are proposing to do. Instead of a police state, they want to create a Nanny State on Steroids. Neglecting to mention that there would still be a big helping of Police State on the side.

It makes more sense if you realize that the primary goal of the people in back of it all is to gain power, not to have a healthy society. Instead of restricting freedom only through the use of physical force, they want to also use therapeutic force...”It’s for your own good, you know.”  Which is terrifying, because while a police beating will end at some point, therapy can go on indefinitely.  It’s basically the same thing as in that famous C. S. Lewis quote about do-gooders, and as he portrayed it all playing out in That Hideous Strength. It has already been partially accomplished.

One of their steps that preceded Abolish the Police was to Abolish the Family. That’s not yet complete, but they have been working hard at it for generations. It was probably Abolish the Faith before that. They work to create social problems, and then “solve” them, and when the solutions don’t work, they take it up a notch and “solve” them some more.

So when I look at the videos of police brutality that they have harvested from the protests and riots, I am getting quite angry about how callous they are about using peaceful protestors as pawns in this campaign to seize and extend power. The protestors serve both as cover for rioters to escalate the level of violence, and as photogenic victims of the police retaliation...the more blood, the better for the Cause.

Looking back at coronavirus, and how it ties in

It’s now long enough since the state started opening back up that the predicted eruption of cases toward a late June or early July peak should have begun. I’m not seeing it yet in the graphs; new positive tests per day, hospital beds, and ICU beds are all basically flat.

I think that the protests may not have much of a net effect on the spread of the virus locally.  Thousands of people were out protesting and rioting, but hundreds of thousands were sitting at home under curfew. Less shopping went on overall because of stores being closed or destroyed, but there was possibly a higher concentration of people in the fewer open grocery stores; some stores were having whole shelves emptied out as people bought food to donate.

Floyd’s April 3 positive test was interesting, because at that time tests were scarce, and commoners were only tested if symptoms were present. From my post from just before Minnesota shut down, I’m reminded that he may have needed to have been exhibiting “severe symptoms“ to have been tested.

I was also sick around that time, but not tested, and my breathing isn’t great even now, although in my case mild seasonal allergies and extreme pregnancy are factors.

I just watched the New York Times’ compilation of videos around the arrest and restraint, until it froze up on me. What the video shows well is the sequence of main events from multiple perspectives. What it shows poorly are the real-time length of each event, and the flow from one thing to the next. The video is about half as long as the whole thing actually took to play out.

Steps further

The county released the autopsy report.   Points of interest: no physical injuries to neck; COVID-19 test positive, but not necessarily from an active case because he had also tested positive in early April (when the number of positive tests per day in Minnesota was approaching but not quite at 100); numerous bruises, none on neck; traces of multiple drugs found, and some of the results seem to indicate use on the day of his death, if I am reading right.

More locally, police said there were reports of threatening letters being left in some people’s yards, in reaction to the politics expressed on their yard signs.

Haven’t heard of anything else around here, besides Chauvin being charged with second-degree murder, and the other officers being given lesser charges. Charges for all of the officers was one of the loudest demands of the protestors. Tomorrow is the funeral, or at least the first funeral, closed to the public, which is likely to be a focus of further protests.

The beginning of the end?

Last night the biggest happenings as far as I know were a group of protestors who lingered at the Capitol after curfew to be arrested, and a beat-up old van with red tape crosses on the windows that a reporter had previously pointed out as a makeshift ambulance turned out to be a supply vehicle for organized rioters. They seem to be using them in other cities, too.

Police allowed a peaceful protest at the site of Floyd’s death to continue well past curfew.

People have been donating enormous quantities of food to the area worst hit by the rioting.

The gas tanker driver was released with no charges; investigation ongoing. The story is that he was the only driver at his company willing to deliver to a black-owned gas station in Minneapolis during the unrest, and that the owner stood up in support for him after the arrest.

Today, we had afternoon thunderstorms, and the news is more focused on the charges that are beginning to be filed on the rioters. And also returning to doling out scoldings about coronavirus risks. The governor is having the state Department of Human Rights do a civil rights investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department, going back ten years.

This post by a Ferguson resident has riot preparation tips, but the one I want to highlight is #9.  The media coverage of the violence in Ferguson died down long before the actual violence did. Most everyone who was doing the rioting is probably still in town. There are reports that a number of vehicles have been fleeing police tonight. Other than that, the crime watch/scanner monitoring Twitter accounts are reporting only a few normal-sounding incidents. Curfews continue.

Not over

Only the gas tanker driver was arrested on the bridge last night; today it is reported that somehow the highway shutdown missed him, and he came right into the bridge area full of protestors at speed, and panicked. The protestors had been peaceful up until then, but they perceived it as an attack, some responding by swarming the truck. He was pulled out of it, and received minor injuries only, thanks to intervention by more peaceful protesters.

A couple of hours later, after curfew began, police surrounded and arrested a group of 100+ protesters, peacefully.  Altogether 276 arrests in Minneapolis.  Evidence found of pre-placed incendiary supplies, and use of stolen cars and stolen or missing license plates. Federal charges for an  Illinois man who helpfully posted evidence of his various crimes on Facebook. No evidence that confirms reports made of guys in KKK robes, however.

Tonight there are two large protests going on—one at the governor’s mansion in St. Paul—some other groups beginning to gather, and a number of isolated instances of lawlessness. I don’t know how the last compares to “normal” crime levels, probably still on the high side, even with the increased police and National Guard presence and level of resident vigilance. Curfew starts later, at 10 pm, and ends earlier, and highways are open for now, but will be closed if needed.

A couple of other takes on the past few days:  by Mitch Berg, acquaintance and former neighbor, and by James Lileks, Star Tribune columnist we’ve spoken to in person a couple of times.