The Ellison example

[Valin]

Power Line:

Scott Johnson

December 21, 2014

 

In “For Rep. Keith Ellison, recent protests speak to a lifelong struggle,” the Star Tribune’s Allison Sherry provides an incoherent update on Ellison’s fraught relationship with law enforcement. There are two problems with the article. Sherry doesn’t know what she’s talking about and she simply provides a platform for Ellison to vent.

 

Sherry works to suggest that there is something complicated about Ellison’s views of law enforcement. She writes, for example: “As a young lawyer, Ellison often worked on cases that alleged excessive force by police officers. Yet he also has fought ardently to get police officers higher pay and better equipment. (He recently sought federal funding for transgender-awareness training for Minneapolis Police and Hennepin County Sheriff’s deputies.)” Cue the laugh track.

 

(Snip)

 

In the beginning his focus was on the Minneapolis scene. Perhaps the lowest moment in Minneapolis’s history was the September 1992 execution-style murder of police officer Jerry Haaf. Haaf’s murder was like that of the NYPD officers murdered yesterday in Brooklyn; Haaf was shot in the back as he took a coffee break at a restaurant in south Minneapolis.

 

The murder was a gang hit performed by four members of the city’s Vice Lords gang. The leader of the Vice Lords was Sharif Willis, a convicted murderer who had been released from prison and who sought respectability as a responsible gang leader from gullible municipal authorities while operating a gang front called United for Peace.

 

The four Vice Lords members who murdered Haaf met and planned the murder at Willis’s house. Two witnesses at the trial of one of the men convicted of Haaf’s murder implicated Willis in the planning. Willis was never charged; law enforcement authorities said they lacked sufficient evidence to convict him.

 

(Snip)

 

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Who is Keith Ellison?

 

Google Jerry Haaf

 

 

Some of us never forget.