Minneapolis ‘a case study’ in what happens when Ilhan Omar and other ‘defund the police’ advocates demonize cops

Radical Democrat Ilhan Omar is still apparently clinging to a discredited defund-the-police ideology even as crime continues to surge in her congressional district.

Squad member Omar represents Minneapolis, Minn., and several adjacent areas in the U.S. House, and crime in nine categories in the city has massively escalated year over year.

“Minneapolis motor vehicle theft has soared by 32.3%, while larceny/thefts are up 30.4% through Aug. 7 compared to the same time in 2021, the crime statistics show. Carjackings have surged by 21.1% this year, destruction of property is up 12.8% and assaults have escalated by 11.4%. The data further shows that burglaries and breaking and entering incidents have increased by 10.3% from last year,” Fox News reported on Monday.

Quality of life for law-abiding citizens is also rapidly decaying in other crime-infested U.S. cities under Democrat control, including those with district attorneys who were elected with campaign funding provided by billionaire George Soros.

U.S. Rep. Omar narrowly prevailed in a Democrat primary on August 9, defeating her principal challenger, who was reportedly pro-police, by a margin of about 50 percent to 48 percent. Less than 3,000 votes formed the difference between the two candidates.

Omar will face Republican Cicely Davis in the November 8 general election and is nonetheless likely to win convincingly in the blue enclave.

Minneapolis voters temporarily came to their senses in November 2021 by voting down an Omar-endorsed proposal (bankrolled by Soros and others) that would have replaced the city’s police department with a so-called public safety department. The city charter amendment lost by 56 percent to 44 percent.

Defunding — sometimes euphemistically described by Omar and many others as reimagining — efforts gained traction among far-left activists after the May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of a city cop.

The city cut about $1 million from the police budget that year, but “the Minneapolis Police Department currently operates on a $196 million budget — about $3 million more than two years ago,” the Daily Mail reported.

In late July, St. Paul ABC affiliate KSTP and other news outlets reported that an upscale Minneapolis neighborhood began crowdfunding to pay for extra police patrols in an effort called the Minneapolis Safety Initiative. “A growing number of neighborhoods are now also paying for these extra patrols,” the news outlet added.

Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute think tank, told Fox News that “Minneapolis is a case study in what happens when municipal leaders decide to demonize the police and criminal justice system for their political advantage…The Minneapolis P.D. is still struggling with staffing, meaning that the added crime comes as criminal justice capacity remains overextended. The result is more harm to Minneapolis residents, particularly its least-privileged, who are disproportionately at risk of criminal victimization.”

Fox News elaborated on the trend: “Following Floyd’s death in May 2020, Minneapolis’s violent crime skyrocketed. Last year, the city fell one murder short of hitting its all-time high of 97 homicides in 1997. And while murders have declined this year, many other crimes are trending in the opposite direction.”

In a flipping-the-script moment during an October 2021 Minneapolis town hall, Omar had the temerity to blame local cops for the crime wave.

“What we must also recognize is that the reduction in policing currently in our city, and the lawlessness that is happening is due to two things. One, the police have chosen to not fulfill their oath of office and to provide the public safety they are owed to the citizens they serve, right? It’s documented. But even before that, it was documented. The Minneapolis Police Department is the most dysfunctional police department, in our state and probably in the country,” she claimed at the time.

“The second part is that there has to be accountability,” she added. “And someone that is actually taking responsibility for what the police does invest into….”

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