Minneapolis pays up

[Valin]

Power Line

Scott Johnson

May 4 2019

Justine’s family filed a civil lawsuit against former Minneapolis Police Officer Mohamed Noor, Minneapolis Police Officer Matthew Harrity, the Minneapolis Police Chief and the City of Minneapolis in federal court here this past July. On Thursday evening the city settled the case for $20 million, $2 million of which the family will donate a Minneapolis Foundation fund to “fight gun violence in the city,” as the Star Tribune puts it in its article on the settlement. The MPR story is here.

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Minneapolis’s race hustlers are having another field day with the settlement. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey could not bring himself to contradict them or say that the size of the settlement reflected the egregious facts of the case. He could not bring himself to deny that race and “institutionalized racism” in the police department had nothing to do with it. At his press conference after the guilty verdict Frey yammered on about “historical and ongoing racialized trauma.”

Mayor Frey would only allow that the circumstances of this case were “unique.” He asserted that he could not say whether this was “worst [case]” or not. If that is true, however, it is true only in a political sense. See Bob Bennett’s July 2018 evaluation of the case quoted above.

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[Valin]

Minneapolis pays up: Bob Bennett comments

Scott Johnson

May 5 2019

Both the Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and attorney Bob Bennett held press conferences on Friday following the announcement of the city’s record-breaking $20 million settlement of the civil lawsuit brought by Justine’s family. Bennett represents the family in the civil lawsuit. Having listened to both press conferences on YouTube, I wrote about the settlement yesterday morning in “Minneapolis pays up.” In that post, by the way, I link to the Star Tribune story including highlights of Frey’s press conference and to the YouTube video of Bennett’s press conference. Frey’s press conference is also available in its entirety on YouTube.

Press coverage of the settlement is as pitiful as the performance of the press at the respective press conferences. To take one example, Bennett observed in response to a question about the impact of the case on the Minneapolis Police Department: “They’ve tightened up the testing for officer suitability at the front end, which was very, very poor in this situation.” You’d think that might have prompted a follow-up question, but you’d be mistaken.

In my post I drew the inference that the city’s settlement at this time was prompted by the imminent undoing of the stay that had been in effect on the civil lawsuit and by the discovery that would follow. Wanting to make sure that I wasn’t off-base, I wrote Bennett yesterday:

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In the Times article, Levy Armstong peddles the racial line on the city’s settlement. She fancies herself a “renowned” figure, but she is just another hustler.

I wanted to correct my post if I had drawn inferences in error, but I conclude from Bob’s message that I was right about the factors underlying the size and timing of the settlement.