Letter to the editor
I sent this letter in to the Star-Tribune regarding today's profile of the Minneapolis Police unit assigned to our neighborhood:
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While I applaud the work of the Minneapolis police, profiles like the one on your front page last Friday upset me. As a resident of the north side for almost five years, it’s been tiring to constantly tell people that they will not be shot or mugged simply for visiting my neighborhood. Stories like yours simply reinforce that notion. I love my neighborhood, and most of the time it’s a beautiful place to live and raise a family. It’s too bad people would never know that from what they read in your paper.
In addition, noticeably missing from reports like this is any attention to the larger dynamics of racial and economic segregation that create poor communities like this one. There would be no north Minneapolis without the mansions of Minnetonka or southwest Minneapolis. Instead, these pieces reinforce the sense of north Minneapolis as an isolated area, the problem child of the urban community. In reality, it’s the whole family that’s dysfunctional. I look forward to the day when reports on my community move from fear-mongering to more constructive dialogue about where to go from here.