Minneapolis, the city where the “Defund the Police” movement first gained traction, has seen a violent crime spike in the last few years that some see as validating its sometime-nickname of “Murderapolis.”
On a summer morning last year, Marnette Gordin was doing her household’s laundry when her 36 year-old son called her. He had been out on an errand, and often stopped by a local gas station for soda, so she assumed that he was calling her from that gas station to ask her if there was anything she wanted.
What she heard, though, was altogether different. She answered her phone to hear her son Telly Blair’s pained voice declaring that he had been shot and begging her to call the cops.
Marnette grabbed her 12 year-old granddaughter and her other son and hot-footed it to the gas station on the city’s North Side, one of the quarters that has long been a focal point of violent crime in the Minneapolis.
The family found Telly’s 1986 blue Chevy Caprice next to a gas pump. Telly himself was slumped in his car, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds to his torso. A 17 year-old assailant, wearing an orange hoodie, had unloaded nine guns from a pistol into the Caprice before absconding.
The paramedics had not yet arrived, but an off-duty nurse who’d been in the gas station at the time of the shooting had tried to stop the bleeding, but to no avail. Telly Blair died from his wounds in front of his family.
According to the city’s crime data, Blair was one of 93 murder victims in Minneapolis last year. That brings 2023’s total very close to the all-time high in 1995, when the city earned its nickname “Murderapolis.” Neighboring St. Paul saw an all-time high of 38 murders last year.
The death of George Floyd at police hands in 2020 helped spark the “Defund the Police” movement, but crime levels in the Twin Cities have now decisively defeated that initiative—the residents want order, it seems, not sloganeering.
