Alpha News’ Liz Collins calls this a “shocking” video, and it would be — from anywhere else other than Minneapolis or perhaps San Francisco. South Minneapolis had been known as a relatively serene urban area, at least until a few years ago. When the extreme-progressive leadership began capitulating on homelessness, things began to change for residents like Dave Marquardt.

When the city embraced Defund the Police after the George Floyd riots, the problems got exponentially worse, as this video shows. The city and the police have abandoned this historic neighborhood, and now the residents feel besieged, robbed, and betrayed:

“I use the word homeless because they are, but they’re homeless because they are addicted to various substances. Obviously, for some it’s meth, some of it’s fentanyl. I think fentanyl is probably the biggest culprit under there. We find needles every day in our yards,” he added.

He also said the location is attractive for addicts because of the freeway ramps and the ability to panhandle.

“There’s also that industry of a bike chop shop. They steal bikes from all over the neighborhood and we see them disassembling them and taking the parts that are worth something, and the rest of them lay there until somebody comes and cleans them up,” Marquardt said.

He argued that Mayor Jacob Frey treats homeless encampments as a “regulatory” issue and not as a “public health issue.”

Most amazing in this video is the open theft of mail and packages. As Marquardt tells Alpha News, most of the residents in the neighborhood have surveillance cameras and camera doorbells, and one can see why. They apparently believed that getting the thieves on camera would force the police department to arrest them for burglary. Instead of enforcing the law, the police have only provided referrals to fence builders, as if they want to become Angie’s List rather than deal with crime and urban blight.

“Isn’t mail theft a federal crime?” Marquardt laments at one point. Yes, indeed it is, and burglary and theft are also local and state crimes that Minnesota and Minneapolis should enforce. Under the current “enlightened” progressive regime running the city, however, those are low priorities when it comes to the “unsheltered,” or whatever euphemism Minneapolis wants to use at the moment. Their expressed priority is to perform “outreach” to the homeless and offer services to them, not to enforce the law and protect the actual residents of the city.

Even the recognition of the crime by the city on its homeless policy page is remarkably soft-soap:

Community members have expressed concerns about: 

• Used needles left on the street and sidewalk 
• Water and electricity being siphoned from nearby properties 
• Property damage 
• People experiencing burglary, threats, assault, and theft 

‘Expressed concerns’? They’ve called the cops, who either don’t have the resources or the authority to fight actual crime and vagrancy in the city. And the passive voice in the final bullet item is enough to drive your average composition teacher into a conniption. Do people ‘experience‘ assaults, burglaries, and threats, or are they being victimized by the people who commit those crimes? The city seems to believe that burglary is an ‘experience,’ a word more on par with a visit to the Cedar Cultural Center than having your mail stolen and people defecating on your yard.

Minneapolis may not have advance as far into the urban death spiral as San Francisco, but that certainly seems to be the ambition of Minneapolis leadership. Marquardt doesn’t plan to stick around for the inevitable finale of collapse and ruin:

“I always considered it to be fairly well run, you know, for a city its size and it was generally safe and generally clean, you know, welcoming to people and you know, it was a fun place to have a lot of variety, variety in cuisine, variety in, you know, your neighbors and lots of different people and just it really it was a fun place to live for many. Probably about six or seven years ago is when I started seeing it slip. And then, of course, with the riots and whatnot, it went from slipping to falling,” Marquardt said.

“I renovated my house. It was vacant and boarded up when I got it. It had been for three years. It was a foreclosure and I spent years restoring it, not just putting it back together, but making it look like it’s supposed to look. I never thought I would leave, especially under these circumstances. But I’m not just leaving Minneapolis. I’m leaving Hennepin County,” he said.

One can completely understand his decision, but good luck selling the place under these circumstances.

This is a shameful situation in Minneapolis, and the people who keep electing the moral cowards to leadership there are to blame. But it’s not just Minneapolis where this rot is spreading either, thanks to a refusal to enforce laws and put an end to vagrancy. We had laws against that for a reason, which keeps becoming clearer and clearer, especially to people who have to live in close proximity to these camps. We had involuntary commitment to mental facilities for good reasons as well. Those laws were necessary for public safety and so that residents in American cities could live in peace.

Instead, the cities are slowly abdicating their social contracts to provide that peace, and their residents are quickly becoming besieged by criminals, the mentally ill, and the collapse of needed commerce. Minneapolis may just be on the leading edge of a national crisis.