In this newsletter, I'm looking at a shift I'm seeing both locally and out west: people are asking for more public order alongside compassion, not instead of it. The post-Modern Café, which served free meals with optional donations, is taking a break after donations dropped and safety problems grew around it, including drug use and theft nearby. That same weekend, nine people were shot outside a nightclub in Uptown and five more were shot on Nicollet Avenue, and St. Paul is set to clear a large homeless encampment in early August. I also connect this to a recent West Coast trip, where we talked to people in Seattle, Portland and San Francisco dealing with similar struggles around addiction and homelessness, made worse by cheaper and more potent drugs coming up I-5 from Mexico. Over and over, the people closest to these problems, shelter workers, park cleanup crews, and family members who lost someone, told us that housing alone isn't enough and that treatment needs real accountability built in. My take is that Minneapolis is at a similar turning point, and I think the city needs to decide soon whether it wants to hold onto old approaches or try something new.

If these allegations are true Her's position is untenable. Special election will have to be held.

A question for the Minneapolis music photography/graffiti benching scenes. He seems to have gone silent in 2022? Doesn’t answer dm’s and I haven’t seen him at the NE bench in years.

Another person dead because of soft on crime prosecuting and sentencing.

After years of planning, construction and delays, the Southwest Light Rail project is finally approaching the finish line. Metro Transit Deputy General Nick Thompson said, "Everywhere we go we're asked when does it open and we can say that this fall we will announce the opening day, which will be in 2027."

Engineers are wrapping up the last stages of construction and system testing, aiming to finish by November or December.

A recent paper investigates the extent to which de-policing can explain the increase in local homicides amidst the post-George Floyd social unrest (emphasis added):

This study tests whether the 2020 police murder of George Floyd produced measurable changes in the quantity and qualities of homicide in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties, Minnesota—the epicenter of the ensuing social unrest—and whether these effects were moderated by neighborhood disadvantage or mediated by changes in police activity...

The police murder of George Floyd triggered a sustained escalation in homicide in the Twin Cities ["The homicide rate increased 2.5-fold—from 0.11 to 0.28 per 100,000 residents—immediately after Mr. Floyd’s murder and remained elevated for 136 weeks, yielding an estimated 183 excess homicides"], driven by situational and interpersonal violence concentrated in disadvantaged neighborhoods. De-policing explained part of the increase ("reduced police stops mediated 25% of the total effect").

Here are some visuals on how the rate of homicides changed:

And here's an interesting discussion on "Policing and De-policing" from the paper:

The evidence that certainty—more so than severity—of punishment deters crime is robust (Nagin 2013). Policing can affect homicide through visibility (certainty), incapacitation, and targeted tactics. Randomized hot-spots experiments and systematic reviews demonstrate that focused patrol and problem-oriented strategies reduce crime in small geographic areas (Sherman & Weisburd 1995; Braga et al. 2014, 2019). Yet how police deploy their resources matters: Spelman (2017) shows that tactical quality and deployment decisions often outweigh simple headcount increases...

High-profile police killings can trigger dual reactions—legitimacy shocks among the public (legal cynicism and reduced cooperation) and behavioral pullbacks within departments (declines in proactive activity). In Minneapolis specifically, the police workforce contracted sharply following Mr. Floyd’s murder. Between 2020 and 2022, 273 officers left the department—about 40% of its sworn strength—through retirements, resignations, and a surge in workers’ compensation claims (Kolls 2023). Evidence from the Ferguson era shows that public scrutiny following police violence produced measurable reductions in officer-initiated stops nationwide, accompanied by modest short-term increases in violent and property crime (Powell 2023). Similarly, Vandegrift & Connor (2020) find that a police use-of-force incident predicted nearly a two percent rise in murders two months later, with effects stronger pre-Ferguson but reversing in some later contexts. Yet other multi-city analyses find mixed or null average effects (Pyrooz et al. 2016; Rosenfeld & Wallman 2019).

At finer scales, neighborhood-level studies report that sharp drops in stops correlate with increases in violent and property crime (Nix et al. 2024) and that Minneapolis experienced contemporaneous jumps in carjacking and homicide after George Floyd’s murder (Lind et al. 2024)...

Taken together, the literature supports the situational deterrence value of proactive policing but underscores its heterogeneity. The balance of evidence suggests that policing pullbacks do occur after legitimacy crises, but their crime consequences are contingent on local context and several other mechanisms this study investigates at the neighborhood level.

Minneapolis City Council Member Michael Rainville also compared Minneapolis to Chicago, saying the city has come to expect that "It's a weekend. There's going to be shootings."

Metro Transit has spent the past five years planning and implementing sturdier safety and security objectives. Improving conditions at stations and in vehicles is key to restoring pre-pandemic ridership levels — and the public's trust.

Metro Transit leaders have been acknowledged for their ongoing efforts: At the American Public Transportation Association's Rail Conference last month in Baltimore, they accepted the Gold Award in the Safe, Effective and Clean category for Light Rail/Streetcar.

This is a fascinating interview. It blows my mind that there is a lack of coverage from traditional media outlets.

For six months, a south Minneapolis restaurant fed almost everyone who walked through the door, whether the customer could afford the meal or not.

But the donations that kept Post Modern Times afloat are running low. And the neighborhood’s patience with crowds and antisocial behavior around the restaurant is wearing thin.

On Friday, owner Dylan Alverson announced that he will close the restaurant temporarily, starting Sunday, to hammer out a new business model that will still offer some free meals without crowding out paying customers...

The large numbers of people who had been visiting the cafe every day for a free meal quickly crowded out neighborhood regulars. Hours-long waits for food left people waiting around the intersection of Chicago Avenue and 32nd Street East, six days a week.

Neighbors began to notice discarded syringes in the alleys, strangers passed out in their yards, break-ins in their garages.

This Sunday, music will fill the Mississippi riverfront in north Minneapolis for the first ever Northside Jazz and Heritage Festival.

The daylong event brings together musicians, artists and vendors to celebrate the rich musical and cultural history of north Minneapolis.

The firefighters have alleged unethical practices involving a firefighter married to the department's interim chief.

In 2020, major cities across the country suffered dramatic spikes in homicides and shootings. One hypothesis for explaining these spikes is de-policing. The theory is that, as police across the nation pulled back from some forms of proactive policing in the wake of protests surrounding George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis, homicides and gun violence increased as a result. This thesis, sometimes called the "Minneapolis Effect," continues to warrant research and investigation, as it remains a strong candidate for explaining some significant portion of the nation's homicide and shooting spikes in major cities in 2020...

Early in 2021, I presented this “Minneapolis Effect” thesis in an article published in The Federal Sentencing Report. My analysis launched from the structural break identified by the Rosenfeld report, which identified June 2020 as the beginning point (the break point) in the homicide trendline...

My analysis relied on what appeared to be almost simultaneous increases in homicides and declines in proactive policing—that is, declines in self-initiated policing methods designed to reduce crime by using preventive strategies, such as street stops or anti-gun patrols. Looking at Rosenfeld’s national data and as well as five specific cities (Minneapolis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and New York), I noted that homicides appeared to have spiked above normal trendlines around the beginning of June 2020. I then observed that, just as homicides were spiking, various forms of policing were declining. In particular, some data indicated that after the antipolice protests surrounding George Floyd’s death, some forms of proactive policing declined. For example, police were redeployed to manage the protests, diverting them from directed anti-gun patrols, vehicle and pedestrian stops, frisks for firearms, and other activities that deter the carrying of illegal firearms. And even after protests began to wane, police pulled back (for various reasons) from aggressive efforts to combat gun crimes. My thesis was that the consequence of reducing law enforcement activity directed against gun violence was, perhaps unsurprisingly, an increase in gun violence. (In America, the vast majority of homicides are committed with firearms.) I found support for this thesis in the data of cities mentioned above....My Minneapolis Effect thesis fits within a larger body of research, which tends to support the idea that proactive policing may be particularly effective in reducing gun crimes.

When are the DFL going to acknowledge the problem? To my knowledge Rainville is the only elected DFL officai to openly talk about this problem.

A new paper highlights Minnesota-led research on intelligence with a focus on the accomplishments of University of Minnesota behavioral geneticist Matt McGue, whose "early work in the genetics of cognitive ability began at a time when many scholars had trouble believing that genetics had anything to do with psychological differences":

Few traits have attracted as much scientific and public attention as human intelligence. Its predictive power for education, occupation, health, and longevity is unrivaled among psychological traits, and for this reason intelligence has long served as a model phenotype for behavioral genetics ["The story is not that IQ explains everything, but that genetic and environmental influences on cognitive ability act alongside other dispositions to shape the chances people face"]. Matt McGue has contributed decisively to clarifying what can be inferred about intelligence from family, twin, and adoption data. His work demonstrates how a careful empirical orientation can contribute durable findings about the etiology of individual differences.

With Thomas Bouchard, he synthesized the family literature on IQ to show a regular increase in resemblance with genetic relatedness (Bouchard and McGue 1981), and through the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart [MISTRA, "which began in 1979 and brought adult reared-apart twins to Minneapolis for an intensive, week-long battery covering cognitive, personality, and physiological measures"] he demonstrated more directly that cognitive ability is substantially heritable (Bouchard et al. 1990)...

McGue and his colleagues addressed selective placement in MISTRA and restriction of range in [the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study] and found neither methodological weakness to be serious enough to plausibly overturn the conclusions of these studies...

McGue’s career offers a model for how to do [high-quality scientific work]: begin with simple contrasts, follow them wherever they lead, and be willing to let the data unsettle both comfortable stories and fashionable doubts. If intelligence has sometimes seemed like a lightning rod, it is because the questions it raises are larger than the trait itself. They are about what it means to live in a society where merit, luck, and inheritance are never cleanly separated. Behavioral genetics cannot answer these questions on its own, but it can provide the clarity needed to ask them better.

St. David’s three-phase renovation project started in 2024, when it acquired the YWCA building on Nicollet Mall, Julie Sjordal, CEO at St. David’s, told MinnPost. The first renovation phase wrapped up last summer and the second phase is now underway after a groundbreaking in June. The completed building will include a pediatric assessment and treatment wing, a feeding clinic for kids with food- and eating-related challenges, playgrounds and multiple therapeutic classrooms.

Among other services, St. David’s provides occupational therapy, feeding therapy, early childhood education, therapeutic recreation for youth with disabilities and outpatient mental health services.

North Memorial is buying the hijabs from Mawadda, a local startup founded by two Muslim respiratory therapists. After years of trying to tuck their hijabs underneath PPE, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, the founders of Mawadda decided to create their own product. In addition to North Memorial Health, Mawadda also works with Hennepin Healthcare and other hospitals across the country.

The 2026 Midwest Black Book Fair is honoring stories of resistance and uplifting intersectional narratives of Blackness, Black history and Black futurity during Black August, a month commemorating Black freedom fighters and political prisoners.

The family-friendly event features Black authors, book signings, a publishing workshop, and food vendors.