In May 2020 George Floyd died while being detained by the Minneapolis police. All hell broke loose here and across the country, with billions of dollars of property destruction, scores of people dying unnecessarily, and a “racial reckoning” that left the country more divided and angry than ever.

A bit more than a month later the Minneapolis City Council voted to disband the Minneapolis Police Department and began stripping funding from the Department, violating the city charter. The Council put a change to the charter on the ballot in 2021, and thankfully the residents rejected it. The decline in public safety had already begun.

The Mayor–the famously liberal Jacob Frey–was sane enough to oppose the Council’s move and their effort to change the city charter, which has a provision requiring a minimum ratio of police to citizens. Still, the budget cuts and the plunge in morale left the city bleeding police officers who left for greener pastures.

In a totally unpredictable development, it turns out that crime has skyrocketed and the city has been left unable to replace officers at nearly the rate at which they are leaving the Department.

Minneapolis losing police officers faster than they can hire, chief calls it ‘unsustainable’ https://t.co/tDccDIC3dU

— David Strom (@DavidStrom) August 9, 2023

Shocking, I know. Who could have predicted this?

So how bad have things gotten?

5 EYEWITNESS NEWS looked at city payroll records and found between 2020 and 2022, the Minneapolis Police Department had 273 officers leave their jobs.

During that same three-year time period, the city hired 117 new officers, which equates to a net loss of 156 officers and an average net loss of 52 officers over the last three years.

If that trend were to continue, MPD would have fewer than 400 sworn officers. As recent as 2019, MPD had about 900 sworn officers on its payroll.

MPD Chief, Brian O’Hara, told KSTP he’s organized a recruiting team to aggressively reverse the current trend of officers leaving the department in high numbers.

It’s almost as if virtue signaling and implementing policies with utterly predictable bad outcomes isn’t a smart idea.

It’s an idea, though, that was adopted in Blue cities across the country, leading to crime emergencies in cities as far apart as Washington DC, San Francisco, Portland, and Chicago. City leaders are panicking, money is being spent like it is water, and citizens are up in arms.

Yet none of these people are willing to admit the obvious: what city leaders did to placate the mobs in 2020 was a horrible mistake and people should be held accountable.

There never are real consequences. A city councilman or Leftist prosecutor here or there gets booted or retires, but nobody on the Left will admit that their basic thesis that the solution to crime is a lighter touch is a bunch of crap.

A group of Minneapolis residents are beefing up security after a string of break-ins in their neighborhood. https://t.co/pWwBZRQh7p

— KSTP (@KSTP) July 31, 2023

Most rational people warned that this was going to happen and were ignored. Now that we have been proven right not one of the people who has caused this mess will admit that we were right and they were wrong.

Murder rates have skyrocketed; cities are declining, and the very people who were supposed to benefit from a kinder, gentler approach to crime have been hit hardest.

Officers say they responded just after midnight Wednesday to an area near the intersection of North Thomas and Oak Park avenues.https://t.co/7WSQ52sf8C

— KSTP (@KSTP) August 9, 2023

Nobody seems to care WHY things have gotten out of hand. The people who should now be tarred and feathered for their dangerous idiocy are in many cases put in charge of fixing the mess they created, and we have every reason to expect that they will screw this up too. There has been turnover in our City Council, but the new “leaders” are about as Lefty as the ones who were replaced.

It is hard to come to any conclusion other than the one none of us wish were true: most cities are doomed to at least a temporary decline and in many cases a permanent one.

Metro Transit Police Chief Ernest Morales III gave a quarterly crime report to Metropolitan Council Wednesday, which showed that crime rose 40% compared to this time in 2022. https://t.co/lb0eJzfc8B

— KSTP (@KSTP) August 3, 2023

Minneapolis hasn’t been prosperous because we have the natural assets that San Francisco or Los Angeles have. Our weather sucks, and the industries that led to our prosperity are less central to the national economy. We don’t sit on the Great Lakes as Chicago does. Our best assets in the 21st century are a decent quality of life, a lower cost of living, and a good education system. All of these assets are depreciating quickly.

Minneapolis is nowhere near Portland’s decline–yet. But our city and state leaders are rushing headlong into that territory.

It is a truism that it is better to avoid problems than clean up the mess after it is out of hand, but here we are. Scores of people are dead because of the mistakes, our city is crumbling, and our downtown is dying by the day.

Some Uptown neighbors struggling with recent break-ins and robberies are banding together to take back their neighborhood one block at a time. https://t.co/hE2RwOKf9r

— KSTP (@KSTP) August 7, 2023

By now it seems pointless for conservatives–or any rational liberals–to work to save these cities. The political structure has been captured by a radical Leftist cabal whose only interest is in getting power, maintaining it, and strip-mining the city of its resources.

That is what happened in Detroit, and the result was the hollowing out of a city. The suburbs can become a haven, but at least here in Minneapolis many of the liberals who have given up on Minneapolis are working hard to ruin the inner rings suburbs now. They have learned nothing from their failures.

Is it any wonder that people are talking seriously about secession from the Blue states, where large populations in cities can outvote suburban and rural areas, especially due to the political machines which can mobilize low-information voters in a way that more dispersed political organizations simply cannot?

Republicans have to invest in building a political machine, but the demographics of the competing voting blocs make doing so much harder for Republicans than Democrats. Getting everybody in a massive public housing project is much easier than going door to door in a rural or exurban area, and the residents are much more likely to hand over their ballots to activists.

The migration to Red states is likely to accelerate, although the influx will increase housing costs making it more difficult.

What else can we do? Fighting back is an attractive option, but is it practical? And parents are rightly disinclined to sacrifice their children to a long-term and risky political project.

Once a large enough proportion of the population becomes committed to a damaging political project it is difficult to see how to stop the decline.

Ask Venezuelans how that has worked. You should be able to find a large number of them here in the US. The people who could do so have moved to the US.