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How Minneapolis Became the Vortex of American Polarization
I wrote this for the Times of London:
David Velasquez, a former police officer who grew up in Minneapolis, remembers the city of his youth as a quiet place with a lot of trust. “There was a time when you could fall asleep without locking your door, no issue. You could drop your wallet with money in it, somebody would return it to you with the money in it,” he told me. “Now, that doesn’t exist.”
Once known outside of the Midwest for little other than Brett Favre, Kirby Puckett, and A Prairie Home Companion, Minneapolis is now famous for riots, political assassinations, police violence and massive fraud schemes. Last year, I spent a couple of days in the city, interviewing people for a story about Governor Tim Walz’s handling of the 2020 George Floyd riots. Now that Minneapolis is back in the news again, first for a massive Somali fraud scheme and then for an ICE agent’s fatal shooting of a civilian, I asked some of those same people what happened to their city. How did it go from “Minnesota nice” to perhaps the most politically polarized city in America?
Reverend Jerry McAffee, an African American pastor at Minneapolis’s new Salem Missionary Baptist Church, told me that Minneapolis has long been a city in which tension brews just inches beneath the surface, like Los Angeles in the 1990s. “It just flares up big at times,” he told me, when its short fuse is ignited.
Read the rest at Times of London.
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By Leighton WoodhouseI wrote this for the Times of London:
David Velasquez, a former police officer who grew up in Minneapolis, remembers the city of his youth as a quiet place with a lot of trust. “There was a time when you could fall asleep without locking your door, no issue. You could drop your wallet with money in it, somebody would return it to you with the money in it,” he told me. “Now, that doesn’t exist.”
Once known outside of the Midwest for little other than Brett Favre, Kirby Puckett, and A Prairie Home Companion, Minneapolis is now famous for riots, political assassinations, police violence and massive fraud schemes. Last year, I spent a couple of days in the city, interviewing people for a story about Governor Tim Walz’s handling of the 2020 George Floyd riots. Now that Minneapolis is back in the news again, first for a massive Somali fraud scheme and then for an ICE agent’s fatal shooting of a civilian, I asked some of those same people what happened to their city. How did it go from “Minnesota nice” to perhaps the most politically polarized city in America?
Reverend Jerry McAffee, an African American pastor at Minneapolis’s new Salem Missionary Baptist Church, told me that Minneapolis has long been a city in which tension brews just inches beneath the surface, like Los Angeles in the 1990s. “It just flares up big at times,” he told me, when its short fuse is ignited.
Read the rest at Times of London.