Bob Collins
Though we are often powerless to prevent that which we can’t see coming, we have full control over how we respond to it. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Crime and Justice
This should settle the debate, but it probably won’t. The St. Paul city attorney says the seats in the First National Bank building are public, not private property, the Pioneer Press reports today. That much should be obvious, given that nearly nine months after an African American man got in trouble for sitting in them, Read more →
A police scandal makes people in even the smallest town head for their corners and then come out swinging.
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You probably don’t have to wonder whether your local Home Depot store was one of the ones where credit card information was stolen by, presumably, Russian hackers. It was, Brian Krebs, the online security expert says. Read more →
A woman wanted to drive despite having her plates revoked, so she found a piece of cardboard and some coloring pencils and made her own license plate. Read more →
The Minnesota court on Tuesday overturned a lower court ruling that tossed out the blood-drawn on Derek Stavish of Sartell, Minnesota, who was driving drunk in June 2012 and crashed his truck, killing an occupant. Read more →
If Ty Hoffman is eventually to have been discovered hiding out in one for the last month, it likely wouldn’t surprise a lot of pilots. Read more →
A woman at Columbia University, one of dozens of schools which allegedly did little to investigate reports of sexual assaults on campus, is starting the school year today by carrying a mattress from class to class. “I was raped in my own bed,” Emma Sulkowicz tells The Guardian. “I could have taken my pillow, but Read more →
Another police scandal is brewing, this time in Atwater, Minnesota, east of Willmar, where the police chief is accused of beheading a pet chicken.
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The St. Paul Police Federation, the police union, is disputing the assertion that police officers were at fault in the arrest of an African American man who was sitting in chairs in the St. Paul skyway. The video of Chris Lollie’s arrest in January, which was released this week (available here), has prompted a call Read more →
Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic pretty much gets it right today in his assessment of the arrest of Chris Lollie, the man in the self-taken video who apparently violated a law that doesn’t exist when he sat down in the St. Paul Skyway (The First National Bank building was listed as the “victim” in the Read more →
Well, this is, according to Beverly Hills police, “unfortunate.” That’s the best the cops could do yesterday to explain why they handcuffed Charles Belk, a film producer who allegedly matched the description of a bank robber — large, and bald, and black. “The Beverly Hills Police Department deeply regrets the inconvenience to Mr. Belk and Read more →
Writer Maya Lang posted this tweet this morning, allegedly to show how blacks are portrayed differently than whites when it comes to profiles, at least in the New York Times. @rgay Here's a side-by-side on Mike Brown vs. Boston Bomber, both from NYT pic.twitter.com/wpcQmFE9Xj — Maya Lang (@WriterMayaLang) August 25, 2014 Here’s the Times’ paragraph that Read more →
David Cazares
A Demonstrator protesting the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown holds up a sign on August 13, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. (Scott Olson / Getty Images) There is a tendency among many in the United States to view young black men as dangerous. As Morehouse College professor Marc Lamont Hill has said, many whites view Read more →
Brigette Mengerson, one of our favorite readers from North Minneapolis, is an unabashed fan of NoMi as we’ve noted in the past. She hardly overlooks its flaws, not the way many people do with the good stories that exist there. Like this one, which she forwarded today. It’s certainly good enough for me to pause Read more →