An incident yesterday morning in downtown Minneapolis illustrates the destructive results of allowing years of anti-police rhetoric to become normalized in much of the metro area.
Hennepin County Sheriff’s deputies came upon a person blocking traffic in their car as they sat adjacent to the Hennepin County Medical Center on Chicago Ave. between 7th and 8th streets. The person was in obvious crisis as they began actively cutting themselves on the head with multiple knives. The person was not cooperative with initial deputies who evaluated that it was best to contain the person and get a negotiator on site, rather than push to detain the person too soon and risk having to use deadly force.
Deputies, police officers, crisis negotiators, and paramedics all worked for over two hours in an attempt to calm the person and gain their cooperation in putting down the knives and surrendering.
Deputies put a contingency plan together in the event the situation deteriorated during negotiation, forcing them to act quickly. That plan involved a bunker and deputies with less lethal weapons to incapacitate the person and safely contain them.
After two hours of negotiations, the person without warning began to cut their own throat. Deputies initiated their contingency plan using less lethal munition to break the car windows and gain access to the person in crisis. They successfully prevented the person from fatally injuring themselves and got the person into HCMC immediately for medical and mental health treatment.
Those deputies, officers, negotiators, and paramedics should have been able to walk away knowing that the work they did yesterday was outstanding – they responded, planned and carried out a difficult and dangerous operation about as good as it could be done.
But leave it to 20-30 people in the downtown area who took it upon themselves to respond to the scene to berate and criticize the personnel on scene. It’s become perfectly acceptable to this mindless sect in our society to assume, react, and obstruct – and they are convinced that what they are doing is righteous.
As the HCSO post about the incident made clear, this group was informed by supervisors on the scene what was happening and why deputies were armed and surrounding the person’s car. But that didn’t matter to these people, because in their minds no matter what our law enforcement is doing it equates to “community trauma,” “over enforcement,” and “excessive force.”
Our courts should consider sentencing these folks, when and if arrested for obstruction, to scenario based “shoot/don’t shoot training for a day and post the results online as humiliation.
Thankfully, those serving us in law enforcement have become numb to this silliness as a way to survive. It’s demoralizing for them nonetheless, so encourage everyone to thank a law enforcement officer for the impossible job they do in 2026. Those small gestures can make a huge difference in an officer’s outlook.
