I don't have to tell you that Scott Johnson's a brilliant guy, nor that he has a great understanding of criminal justice issues in Minneapolis. But to be able to use a Nick Coleman column as evidence for what is wrong with Minneapolis these days, ...that, my friends, is pure genius. Scott hoists the StarTribune with dispatch:

One might think that a column like Coleman's would prompt an immediate demand for the restoration of routine law enforcement in north Minneapolis. Today's Star Tribune, however, suggests that the city's biggest law enforcement problem is too many white officers...

Understand what Scott is saying about this article. The STrib is accusing white officers of allowing minority neighborhoods' windows to be broken, its corners to be filled with drug peddlers and purveyors of sex, because white officers don't care about those neighborhoods -- or worse, that those are the neighborhoods minorities deserve. Local NAACP leaders aren't asking whether the new cops will do the job that Coleman reports isn't getting done; they are turning it instead into both a jobs program and another attempt to accuse white cops of racism. But city leadership can't win: If they enforce the law they are preying on minorities; if they don't enforce they are ghettoizing them. Scott concludes:

Minneapolis badly needs a mayor sufficiently committed to "diversity" that he will take the political heat that is generated when law enforcement provides protection even to the city's poorest minority citizens.