Minnetonka votes for Walz/Ellison/Moriarty then complains about crime
The brutal crime of carjacking hit the suburb of Minnetonka recently, motivating 100 residents to show up at a city council meeting last night demanding accountability. The remedy for this crime (or any other carjacking) won’t come from the city council, but there was a meeting scheduled and the mayor and council agreed to listen to their citizens vent about crime.
The local TV stations sent cameras to the meeting to capture the emotional reaction of white suburban Minnetonka residents to a crime that’s happened to black Minneapolis residents hundreds of times this year. As our recent report showed, black Minnesotans in 2021 were 9.5 times more likely than white Minnesotans to be victims of serious crime (murder, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, and rape).
The DFL-led legislature did create a new crime category for carjacking this year but stopped short of assigning any penalty to the crime, leaving that to the Sentencing Guidelines Commission, appointed by DFL Gov. Tim Walz. Thankfully, American Experiment supporters flooded the commission with emails demanding carjacking receive a felony-level sentence. Without that effort, the crime of carjacking would have been treated like the existing robbery offense.
While I sympathize for the Minnetonka citizens who took to the microphone last night to express their outrage at the situation and call for strong accountability, it needs to be said: they voted overwhelmingly for the people who caused this lawlessness and continue to allow it on a daily basis.
It starts at the top with Gov. Tim Walz, who froze for three days when the riots began in May 2020 because he didn’t recognize what was happening and lacked the courage to use force to stop it. The people of Minnetonka rewarded this lack of leadership by choosing Walz over his Republican challenger in 2022 by 10,822 votes. Ten thousand votes!
They also supported Attorney General Keith Ellison over his Republican challenger by 7,861 votes. Ellison’s hand-picked candidate for Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty won Minnetonka by 1,044 votes. Moriarty and Ellison have no intention of cracking down on carjacking or any other violent crime. They are more interested in criminals than victims.
The people of Minnetonka supported the DFL candidate for State Senator over their Republican challenger by 9,477 votes and the DFL candidate for State House by 9,249 votes. The legislature passed a 529-page public safety bill last session that focused on the impact on the offender, not the impact of crime on law abiding citizens. The bill did nothing to address violent, repeat offenders and the sense of lawlessness spurred by the riots that continues today.
Republican cries for stiffer penalties and more accountability were drowned out last year by the overwhelming desire to keep abortion legal in Minnesota. I’m sure that’s what drove the huge victories for the DFL in Minnetonka. Maybe this carjacking incident will wake people up and change their priorities for leadership at the state and county level. Maybe.