Over 10,000 crimes targeting individuals before the summer has even arrived isn’t a “perception” problem
While everyone is dutifully (and inappropriately) capitalizing ‘Black’ and talking about how the area needs to ‘center’ black people, and black organizations are offering their proposals for ‘George Floyd Square’ and the ‘People’s Way’, how black is the Floyd memorialization?
The Floyd family organization, was working with Professor Anjali Ganapathy, Heather Willy, Vora Limpaphayom, Ryan Yin and Julia Gerloff although NEOO Developers, a black firm, was on board as consultants. The Agape proposal featured the Landon Group, almost entirely run by white women, and Victoria Yepez, P3 turned to a California real estate developer best known for building upscale high rises and Urban League to Nawal Noor: a Somali “entrepreneur”.
And none of this (except perhaps the self-cleaning toilets) will solve the real problems here.
The Minneapolis murder rate is still far higher than it was the year before Floyd’s drug overdose death was used as a pretext for massive race riots and so far this year there have been over 4,000 assaults, 800 burglaries, 4,577 thefts, 2,392 stolen cars, 303 robberies, 341 sex offenses, and 1,578 shots fired. This isn’t the story being told to the public by the media in headlines like “Twin Cities see drops in violent crime, but perception remains an issue”. Over 10,000 crimes targeting individuals before the summer has even arrived isn’t a “perception” problem.