Ilhan Omar: ‘Not my job’ to explain Minneapolis crime rise

The Washington Times:

Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar said in a new interview that it’s “not my job” to explain rising crime in Minneapolis amid her calls to disband the police department in her district in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

“I am for disbanding the Minneapolis Police Department,” Mrs. Omar, whose district includes Minneapolis, told The New York Times magazine in an interview published Friday.

“Our police department is fully intact, while the crime rate is higher than it was last year,” she said. “That is not because of the department being disbanded. That is because of what? Where is the answer from the people who advocate not disbanding the Police Department? How do they answer the police still being there and this rise of crime?

“I don’t defend or explain the rise of crime,” she continued. “That’s not my job. The job of explaining the rise of crime falls onto the people who advocate more police, because we do have more police right now in Minneapolis and that crime continues to happen. The reality is that about 50 percent of homicides in the city of Minneapolis go unsolved. Rape kits have been destroyed by the Minneapolis Police Department. There is a crisis in credibility with the Minneapolis Police Department.”

Minneapolis is in line with a national trend that has seen murders on the rise in cities across the country. Police statistics show violent crime is up 17% in Minneapolis’s low-income neighborhoods so far this year, and 30% in the city’s higher-income neighborhoods, the Star Tribune reported.

Read more at The Washington Times