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On Monday, U.S. Sen. JD Vance — the Republican candidate for vice president — returned to Minnesota and visited Minneapolis’ still-vacant Third Police Precinct. He also met with retired police officers who were in that building during the violent riots in 2020. Vance repeated what I and most Minnesotans have been saying over the past four years:
“What was Gov. Tim Walz doing to keep these officers safe and to bring order to the city of Minneapolis? The answer was absolutely nothing.”
Vance also pointed out that crime has risen significantly in Minnesota under Walz’s governorship and that more than 1,400 businesses have packed up and left the city.
There were significantly more murders, shootings, reported gunshots, aggravated assaults and robberies reported in 2023 than there were in 2019. There were also more carjackings — which were not tracked as a category independent of robberies until 2020 because there were not enough occurrences worth reporting independently. And it is not only the statistics that are shocking — the crimes themselves continue to shock us, too. Just last week, six juveniles aged 11 to 14 were arrested for a string of armed robberies.
