A Look at Who Runs Minneapolis

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) asks U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Sonny Perdue a question in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry about Implementing the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 in Washington, D.C., February 28, 2019. USDA photo by Preston Keres

Minneapolis has long been a bastion of Democrat woke progressivism, writes Francis Menton in the Manhattan Contrarian. The city, Mr. Menton points out, has been run top to bottom and at all levels of government “by representatives of the far left wing of the Democratic Party; and that has been true for as far back as human memory stretches.”

• Jacob Frey, the current Mayor of Minneapolis. He won the office in 2017 in a free for all among 17 candidates, of whom 10 were from the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party and not one was a Republican. The candidates competed as to who was the farthest left. Frey out-lefted them all. His big issues were “climate change,” affordable housing, and, yes, reforming the police.
• Richard Erdall, the last Republican Mayor of Minneapolis. Erdall served for one day in 1973. Prior to Erdall, the previous Republican Mayor was Kenneth Peterson, who left office in 1961.
• The City Council consists of 13 members. 12 are members of the DFL (Democratic) Party, and one is a member of the Green Party. There are no Republicans.
• Ilhan Omar, the federal Congressperson. Omar is a far-left Democrat, Muslim, immigrant from Somalia, and member of “the squad.” Omar won her seat in 2018 by a margin of 78-22 over her Republican opponent.
• Tim Walz, the Democrat governor.
• Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, U.S. Senators. Both are Democrats.
• Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s chief law enforcement officer. Ellison is a Democrat of the radical left variety, an African American and a Muslim, who previously held Omar’s Minneapolis Congressional seat for 12 years, and who has recently been Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee.
• Medaria Arradondo, police commissioner and an African American. In Minneapolis the police commissioner is a mayoral appointee. Arradondo has been in office since 2017.

John Fund in National Review argues that “It’s Past Time to Examine How Police Unions Protect Bad Cops.”

Writing in the Stanford Law Review, scholar Katherine Bies notes that ever since “the rise of police unions to political power in the 1970s,” they have succeeded in shielding their members from public accountability. “Police unions have established highly developed political machinery that exerts significant political and financial pressure on all three branches of government,” Bies writes. “The power of police unions over policymakers in the criminal justice context distorts the political process and generates political outcomes that undermine the democratic values of transparency and accountability.”

Francis Menton continues:

The protesters know that they are outraged, but somehow they are unable to put two and two together to figure out that the progressive politicians that they support are the very same people who are perpetuating the regime of public employee unaccountability that leads to tragic incidents like that of George Floyd.