Minneapolis – Lone Candle

The Minneapolis police chief said that ICE’s irresponsible behavior is creating great strain on the city’s police force. So is people’s aggressive antagonization and anger at ICE.

Viewing the incident where the ICE officer killed a woman, the chief said ICE officers appeared to create a situation that was dangerous and acted against good policing.

He made tough progress to rebuild the Minneapolis police department after the George Floyd protests, and he fears that ICE tactics are going to create a huge setback.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DttxfyGBwj0

Video of the Minneapolis ICE Shooting Does Not Resolve the Issue of Whether It Was Legally Justified

Posted on January 9, 2026January 9, 2026 by Lone Candle

Legally…”Under the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment precedents, the crucial question is not whether Good was actually trying to run Ross down but whether his avowed belief that she posed a threat to him was “objectively reasonable” given “the totality of the circumstances.”

The 1985 case Tennessee v. Garner involved a suspected burglar who was shot while fleeing police. The Supreme Court held that the use of deadly force is unconstitutional in such circumstances “unless it is necessary to prevent the escape and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”

To assess whether a use of force is “objectively reasonable” under the Fourth Amendment, the Court explained four years later in Graham v. Connor, judges should consider “the totality of the circumstances,” paying “careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case.” The Court said relevant factors include “the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.”

…

The Justice Department’s policy on the use of force jibes with what the Supreme Court has said. “Deadly force may not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect,” it notes, and “firearms may not be discharged solely to disable moving vehicles.”

The Justice Department explains that “firearms may not be discharged at a moving vehicle unless: (1) a person in the vehicle is threatening the officer or another person with deadly force by means other than the vehicle; or (2) the vehicle is operated in a manner that threatens to cause death or serious physical injury to the officer or others, and no other objectively reasonable means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle.” The circumstances of the Minneapolis shooting suggest that Ross may have violated that policy.”

https://reason.com/2026/01/09/video-of-the-minneapolis-ice-shooting-does-not-resolve-the-issue-of-whether-it-was-legally-justified/

Eliminating Single-Family Zoning Isn’t the Reason Minneapolis Is a YIMBY Success Story

Posted on June 25, 2022 by Lone Candle

“Housing production is up, and rents do indeed appear to be falling. But the effects of Minneapolis’ particular means of eliminating single-family-only zoning, and allowing up to triplexes on residential land citywide, have been exceedingly modest.

Newly legal triplexes and duplexes make up a tiny fraction of new homes being built. Other less headline-grabbing reforms appear to be doing the Lord’s work of boosting housing production.”

…

“Wittenberg credits the city’s elimination of parking minimums—which had typically required one parking spot per housing unit—with facilitating increased construction of smaller apartment buildings.

The city has been chipping away at residential parking minimums since 2009. The Minneapolis 2040 plan eliminated them entirely. (The city has also adopted some rather un-free market parking policies, including parking maximums in some areas and bike parking minimums.)

Data culled by Wittenberg, and shared with Reason, shows that 19 major projects have been approved by Minneapolis’ Planning Commission since parking minimums were eliminated. The median project provided .42 residential parking spaces per unit, with smaller apartment buildings typically including even less parking.

“For site constraint reasons and economic reasons, it would have been hard to park those buildings at one parking space per unit,” he says. “We’re pretty clearly seeing that is making a significant difference.”

In January 2021, Minneapolis also implemented additional parts of the 2040 Minneapolis comprehensive plan that allows for larger, denser apartment buildings in more of the city, particularly along commercial corridors and near public transit stops. That’s also helped facilitate more development, says Wittenberg.

Flisrand, on Twitter, argues that the fight over eliminating single-family-zoning sucked up most of the attention in the Minneapolis 2040 debate, thus paving the way for more impactful policies like parking minimum elimination and commercial corridor upzoning.”

…

“One also doesn’t want to learn the wrong lesson that eliminating single-family zoning is the only supply increasing reform cities need to adopt.

There’s a certain current of thought on the political left—represented most prominently by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.)—that supports eliminating single-family zoning in wealthy neighborhoods while also expressing extreme skepticism of denser private, market-rate development elsewhere in the city

But legalizing the latter type of development, at least in Minneapolis’s experience, appears to go a lot farther in actually producing more housing units and holding down rents.

More and more jurisdictions across the country are catching on to the fact that their zoning laws are strangling housing production and driving up housing costs, and moving to make changes.”