By Christine Favocci, The Western Journal
Published July 1, 2020 at 11:33pm
There used to be an understanding in civil society that vulnerable citizens, particularly children, deserve protection and care from the adults capable of doing so.
Then the leftists in America lost their collective minds and decided that police — not criminals — were dangerous, racist predators, particularly in Minneapolis, where residents in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood vowed never to call police fearing for the safety of its black residents.
They kept that promise even as a juvenile was sexually assaulted Thursday in the park where a homeless encampment of some 200 tents popped up in the community, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
A juvenile was sexually assaulted overnight Thursday at Minneapolis’ Powderhorn Park, at one of the park’s growing homeless encampments. The people who took the victim to the hospital did not call police. https://t.co/e0nYz0RWGE
— Star Tribune (@StarTribune) June 27, 2020
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Although bystanders brought the juvenile to an area hospital for treatment, it was the staff at Abbott Northwestern Hospital who alerted police early Friday morning. The victim was turned over to social services.
The park, which was patrolled only by civilians, also was the site of a shooting late last month.
The circumstances that allowed this to happen in the first place would be an amusing “I told you so” moment about the lunacy of leftism had they not ended in real-life tragedy — with surely more to come.
After the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, leftists latched on to the insane narrative that police in general do not protect the public but rather are themselves vicious perpetrators who prey on innocent minorities.
Instead of seeing the incident as a crime committed by an individual officer who overstepped his bounds and will be punished accordingly, residents of Powderhorn Park decided all police were dangerous to people in their diverse, up-and-coming neighborhood and collectively vowed not to involve law enforcement no matter what, according to The New York Times.
Residents had previously fought vigilantly to clean up the crime in their area, but being particularly vulnerable to the narrative that police were the problem, they decided to instead police themselves — with predictable results: more drugs, more crime and a growing homeless encampment that formed in the park last month.
EXCLUSIVE drone footage of the tent city that has overrun a public park in Minneapolis.
The city recently passed a resolution allowing the homeless to remain camping in Powderhorn Park.
Residents in the progressive neighborhood vow to not call the police on anyone in the park. pic.twitter.com/QnuTYGH5J5
— Alpha News MN (@AlphaNewsMN) June 26, 2020
After resident Mitchell Erickson was held up at gunpoint for his car keys near his home by the park, he called police but then had regrets after reflecting on the supposed danger it posed to the two black teenage perpetrators.
“So I would have lost my car. So what? At least no one would have been killed,” Erickson told The Times, which did not address the glaring irony of a man who had a gun pointed at his chest worrying instead about police officers shooting his armed attackers.
And still, that narrative and mentality remained impervious to the glaring reality even as a heinous crime took place against a child in the park last week.
Residents speaking about the incident to KMSP-TV excused the possible attackers and lamented the lack of government involvement, again blind to the irony of rejecting government help in the form of law enforcement.
“Community response — not government response — we don’t have any government help in this situation,” community advocate Sheila Delaney said in the report.
“The conditions that allowed for the assault to happen are everywhere in our culture,” Delaney said, “and if you’re looking at a situation where people are vulnerable in tents, of course the vulnerability is amplified.”
Delaney did not address the vulnerability of the juvenile victim or that of the residents who are at risk because the scads of homeless drug addicts and criminals are allowed free rein in order to assuage white guilt about the supposed scourge of racist police.
Lisa Clemons, the founder of A Mother’s Love Initiative, which provides outreach and support to vulnerable individuals and communities, seemingly excused the behavior of the offender.
“I think it’s sad and I think it’s a tragedy because I think we keep forgetting there is a reason a lot of them are in the park,” Clemons said. “And those are addiction issues, so we have not addressed addiction issues, we have not addressed housing issues, and as a result we have a minor child who was sexually assaulted in that very park.”
It’s a shame she lavished her protective motherly instinct on the attacker rather than the young victim, but this misplaced sympathy is apparently typical of the convoluted philosophy that pervades the neighborhood.
Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board Commissioner Londel French said they “try to make it as safe as possible” in Powderhorn Park. Of course, police are typically the first and best line of defense in public safety, but French instead lamented it was money that was the problem.
“If I had control of billion-dollar budgets, yeah, help would be on the way,” he said. “But I have control over me and eight other people have control over a park board budget that wasn’t meant to address the problem of homelessness.”
“We know the government can do a lot when it wants to, and I’m not seeing it here,” Delaney told KMSP.
Delaney is correct that police cannot address the issue of homelessness, but they sure can keep the public safe from its consequences.
Powderhorn Park is a microcosm for the broader movement to defund the police and demonstrates exactly the types of problems that arise in the absence of law enforcement.
In cities such as Seattle, New York and Minneapolis, where violence spreads unimpeded and police are denigrated or defunded, leftists seem content with the violence as long as it is perpetrated by criminals and not police officers.
It is difficult for rational people not to look upon this movement and wonder whether they are all under some sort of mass delusion.
The left is always quick to advocate for children when it comes to bloated government programs, but when a juvenile is sexually victimized as a direct result of liberalism run amok, they side with the perpetrators. (Maybe that’s a consequence of defending abortion on demand favoring the rights of the mother over those of the unborn child.)
Removing police from a community and then blaming the resulting problems on “the system” or some other vague boogeyman is sheer madness — in other words, liberalism.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.