MMMM... Minneapolis

[Snake]

Council member Linea Palmisano said armed neighborhood patrols, or even efforts to just keep unfamiliar people out of a neighborhood, opens a Pandora’s box.

“We are lurching for solutions,” she said, noting she doesn’t support the idea of doing away with the police department but supports the idea of letting residents vote on it.

With the neighborhood patrols, “you could very easily create the same things we rally against,” she said.

In late June, residents near a commercial strip that had been looted, and the 3rd Precinct station that was abandoned and burned, were seeing a surge of shooting and drug-related crime on their block.

“It got to the point where crime had no consequences,” said Tania Rivera, 30, who runs a child-care center with her mother. “It was being done deliberately out in the open. Drive-through drug dealing, drive-through prostitution, everything from gunshots to assaults to sex out in the public. Everything you didn’t want your neighborhood to look like.”

So after a number of community meetings, neighbors began constructing a barrier to close off two blocks of their street, first with trash cans, then debris. For a while, a boat on a trailer protected one intersection. Eventually, a nearby iron maker constructed a permanent gate. Police gave their approval as long as emergency responders could get through if requested by the neighborhood.

Neighborhood men also began an armed patrol, kicking out anyone who didn’t belong on the block after dark.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-minneapolis-armed-residents-set-up-patrols-amid-calls-to-defund-the-police-11595698725