https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/868464167/armed-neighborhood-groups-form-in-the-absence-of-police-protectionArmed Neighborhood Groups Form In The Absence Of Police ProtectionCesia Baires knocks on the three apartment doors above her restaurant and a neighboring taqueria just before curfew.
A woman opens the door. Her two young children are inside.
"Remember," she says to them in Spanish. "Same thing as yesterday. I'm going to come check on you. If there's anything you guys need, give us a call right away."
Meanwhile, a few men climb through the window and on to the roof to set up semi-automatic weapons as the curfew begins in Minneapolis. It's something Baires never thought she would have to do as a small-business owner, but then she found out these apartments were occupied.
"Material things we can replace, that's true," she says. "But there are families up here. These aren't empty buildings."
As break-ins and fires raged in the first days of mass protests over the killing of yet another black man in an encounter with police, the city seemed to descend into a security vacuum. She says the police disappeared from this neighborhood. That's when she and others started forming patrols to include people with licensed weapons.
...
"It's not something that I would want, but we've seen how, for at least the first couple days, we were left alone," she says. "There were no cops that would come around. So what are we to do? Just stand there and do nothing?"
It's pathetic that NPR "has to" couch this predictable reaction to police being forced to pull back from effective policing by citing a PC minority that is acting in self-defense. I guess "whites" or East Asians or South Asians acting in self-defense is too un-PC.
