Minneapolis Residents to Form Armed Community Patrols Amid Calls to Defund Police

Minneapolis residents in some areas that have suffered from rioting are forming armed community watch, or a Breitbart calls it ‘militia’,  to handle the surge of crime that’s followed the George Floyd killing in May. One neighborhood has erected barricades to protect itself from outsiders.

While no one can blame the residents — in fact they should be applauded for doing what it takes to protect their own – this is, in ways I’ll explain below, not good. It is, however, a sign of things to come in countless Democrat-run cities:

In late June, residents near a commercial strip that had been looted, and the 3rd Precinct station that was abandoned and burned, were seeing a surge of shooting and drug-related crime on their block.

“It got to the point where crime had no consequences,” said Tania Rivera, 30, who runs a child-care center with her mother. “It was being done deliberately out in the open. Drive-through drug dealing, drive-through prostitution, everything from gunshots to assaults to sex out in the public. Everything you didn’t want your neighborhood to look like.”

So after a number of community meetings, neighbors began constructing a barrier to close off two blocks of their street, first with trash cans, then debris. For a while, a boat on a trailer protected one intersection. Eventually, a nearby iron maker constructed a permanent gate. Police gave their approval as long as emergency responders could get through if requested by the neighborhood.

It goes on to say that men in the neighborhood “began an armed patrol, kicking out anyone who didn’t belong on the block after dark.”

The Journal provides a number of other examples.

So what we have now, in a major America city, are desperate residents constructing barriers to keep out people who, in their opinion, do not belong…

Listen, the first, the very first priority of government is to protect our God-given rights from being violated, most especially by others. We have a God-given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the government has no higher purpose than to see to it those rights are not interfered with.