Jay Clark wrote:
> When I organized in the Jordan neighborhood, I would hear people complain
> regularly how, when they reported a crime, a police officer would tell them
> what do they expect, they live in north Minneapolis, or why don't they move
> out to the suburbs. .
> I think Jay Clark is making an unwarranted leap in comparing Chicago police
> to Minneapolis police and an old Italian neighborhood to Minneapolis
> neighborhoods. Trying to bridge both time, space, and age to compare them
> isn't fair either way. Chicago established "ethnic enclaves" much earlier
> than Mpls. The fact that one neighborhood has so many cops that no one
> bothers them may say more to the issue of Italian systems brought to Chicago
> and maintained. Minneapolis and St. Paul dismantled the last remaining
> ethnic enclaves--Swede's Hollow in St. Paul (50s)and Bohemian Flats (much
> earlier) here. Jay isn't comparing two like things.
Twenty-eight? years ago, Mpls felt, visually, like a Northern European
enclave. High percentage of blonds, high percentage of long Norse heads, blue
eyes. It felt like African Americans were a little teeny, tiny population.
Found some Spanish speaking people in St. Paul in a sort-of enclave.
Twenty-eight years later, only a generation and a half, the picture of
Minneapolis feels very different. Lots of the cohesion Minneapolis had prior
to the freeway was blythly wiped out so that people's habits changed--where one
shopped, where one went to church, school, work.. For a city the size of
Minneapolis--without suburbs because our police don't police there, there has
been a huge amount of social change. Enter a lare population of Southweast
Asian peoples, followed by Somalies, burgeoning of the Spanish speaking
population. A not so large group of Russian and Eastern European Jews. Middle
easterners and Africans from a variety of countries there.
I think Minneapolitans have been startled by these changes and the period of
adjustment is not over by a long chalk. On top of that add crack, crank,
heroin, and whatever else. Minneapolis police were in no way psychologically
prepared for that--not that any of us were. Perhaps more than anything else
(like red-lining by banks, insurance companies, and the city) drugs and alcohol
have torn my neighborhood apart. It's dismembered families, exploded blocks,
trashed whole sections of Lake Street.
What was the culture of Minneapolis Police Dept. before these changes? How is
it different now? Without some answers there, you cannot figure out where to
put the lever to move the rock.
Wizard Marks, Central
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