Downtown Minneapolis

If you’ll forgive me, I would like to talk about something fairly serious tonight. Allow me the indulgence for my birthday, or for the sake of it being my damn site anyways.
Last Friday, I was a block away from a murder. Derick Holliday was arrested for shooting Alan Reitter in the head after Holliday left a movie. It sounded horrifying, and it was. It was completely heinous and arbitrary.
Then the details of the crime came out and led to several more issues. The first was the rap industry, as the movie Holliday had gone to see was ATL, a movie about growing up in and persevering through the ghettos of Atlanta. It starred, most notably, rappers T.I. and Big Boi. There was outrage on some local radio networks about irresponsible rappers and the rap community. I’ll get back to this later.
The second was the lack of a police presence and the danger found in downtown Minneapolis. Now, the shooting occurred in Block E, an entertainment district downtown, and the police presence is stepped up more there than anywhere else in the downtown area. And were this such a dangerous part of town, I find it unlikely that Block E would be so popular or that a homicide in this part of town would dominate the headlines for almost a week.
Now, the real problems in Minneapolis are these. If you’ll recall, I mentioned that race was an issue in Minneapolis. Now, I’m not saying that race was the motive for Holliday firing into a crowd of white people, but I will say this. Holliday, from North Minneapolis, a predominantly black part of town, clearly suffered from a mental defect. He claimed to have started shooting because cheese was spilled on him. Now, if you don’t think someone living in the suburbs would have been diagnosed and treated at this point in his life, you’re fooling himself. Instead, he is labeled a bad seed, a “gangbanger”, and nothing is done to deal with him until he shoots someone in the street.
Race also plays a role in the theory that the movie caused Holliday to want to emulate it. Gangbangers, (a term coined by local idiot and radio host Tom Bernard) would go to this movie and start shooting, they said. But the movie was about getting past this type of incident. But people like Bernard assume that that’s all urban people care about: drugs, sex and violence. There is an idea people that are facing adversity prefer. They want to get out. And that was what the movie is about, should Tom Bernard actually see it. Mr. Holliday wasn’t emulating anything. He is just insane.
So the problem, then, isn’t with police presence, or movies. The problem is the identifying of truly disturbed persons, and making sure they don’t get their hands on lethal weapons.

I’ll be back with your regularly scheduled blogging in a couple of hours.