Not long ago a homeless man who was wanted on multiple warrants stabbed to death an innocent bystander at a bus stop in a wealthy suburb. It appears the perpetrator had been civilly committed twice and released. He was a chronic serial offender, yet allowed to roam the streets until he took the life of another human being.1
It’s a tragic tale but one we’ve heard before in paces like Los Angeles, where a UCLA student was brutally stabbed and killed by a homeless man or New York where every time you ride the subway you take your life into your own hands.2 Especially if you think about defending yourself.
Ask Daniel Penny.3
But this was Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of the city of Minneapolis whose wanton lawlessness in 2020 set off a nationwide urban crime wave from which the country—let alone the Twin Cities—has yet to recover.
The homeless crisis has exploded like never before. Indeed, were it a predominantly warm-weather phenomenon limited to the largest cities as it used to be, you wouldn’t be seeing so many encampments like the one in the Minneapolis video above.
Minnesota is in an absolute free fall because the most dangerous of perpetrators are repeatedly released by governing elites who don’t give a damn.4 Their enablers in local media (which has now delivered to its ‘wokeist’ of patrons the dysfunctional state they’ve wanted for so long) even described the history of this 32-year old violent homeless offender as one “of largely nuisance crimes.” 5
To be sure, it’s happening all over blue America with an average murder rate in 2021 for those states supporting Biden at 10.8 per 100,000 people compared with 7.3 for those that backed Trump—almost 50% higher.6
But for those redder communities who still think public safety is job one…well, they’re out of luck as well. Five years ago the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declared vagrancy a constitutional right in Martin v Boise, i.e., ruling that ‘anticamping’ ordinances violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.7
