Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Fear-Stoking Scanner Junkie to Lose Grift
By the end of the month, new encryption methods will block public access to police scanners. And I’m sure your first response to this news is the same as mine: What is @CrimeWatchMpls going to do?
If you’re blithely unaware of Crime Watch—or if they’ve blocked you so long ago you forgot they existed—it’s the apparently profitable “news service” of a paranoid wingnut named Shelley Leeson, who essentially transcribes scanner reports to social media all day. A typical tweet: “Minnesota's motto: CRIMINALS FIRST.”
Naturally, Leeson is furious about this “attempt to silence public safety watchdogs like Crime Watch,” saying “The ONLY reason for this is to hide crime happening in Minneapolis.” But she's maybe even angrier with supposedly less crime-fixated local media outlets. “They don't want to report on crime (it's bad for their ad revenue),” she writes, “and … absolutely hate that Crime Watch incessantly calls them out for how little—and how incorrectly—they report on crime.”
Haha yes, crime, which has historically been undercovered in the news. What’s the old saying? “If it bleeds, we no needs.”
There are certainly valid complaints about the full encryption of city scanners. But while I’m all for transparency, I’m also happy to see Leeson lose money. So you can see the dilemma I’m facing here.
Koski Out
The Minneapolis mayoral race is still seven months away, but it has already seen its first casualty. Saying she could not be her "authentic self” if she continued her campaign, Emily Koski, who currently represents Ward 11 on the Minneapolis City Council, announced Monday morning that she's dropping out of the race.
The tone of Koski’s withdrawal statement is one of frustration if not utter exasperation.
“The toxicity in our city’s politics is real,” she says. “It punishes integrity, vilifies collaboration, and prioritizes power over people. It’s a system where doing what’s right isn’t just difficult, it’s discouraged at every turn. The only antidote is change. Real, systemic, courageous change.”
Koski experienced a disappointing caucus last week, with the non-Frey voting block either coalescing behind state Sen. Omar Fateh (DFL-Minneapolis) or unallotted “anti-Frey” delegates. The hope had been that she would be able to position herself as more politically experienced than DeWayne Davis, yet more moderate (and therefore more likely to peel off Frey supporters) than Fateh.
One possible factor in her decision is that Koski was blocked from using funds that had been donated to her City Council campaign fund. Ward 13 Council Member Linea Palmisano, along with big-money DFL donors Sam and Sylvia Kaplan, complained to the Office of Administrative Hearings. (Mayor Jacob Frey himself used council campaign cash for his mayoral campaign in 2017, but the state law governing those funds has since changed.)
Koski spoke to Racket earlier this year for our Let’s Taco ‘Bout Politics series. If she’d like to do an exit interview about what’s specifically wrong about Minneapolis politics after she steps down from her council seat, we’d love to chat again.
Hiding the Homeless
Two weeks ago, Mayor Jacob Frey claimed that there were now only 27 homeless people in Minneapolis, though that number rang as suspiciously low to many observers.
In the Star Tribune today, Susan Du went looking for the other homeless people that Frey and MPD Chief Brian O’Hara say don’t exist, and she found many of them seeking partial shelter in less conspicuous places now that encampments are routinely torn down. The exact number of people experiencing homelessness at any given moment, she writes, is extremely difficult to quantify.
This much is certain: In the second half of 2024, the city spent $330,000 to close 17 encampments. With shelters routinely full by midday, the unhoused people Du spoke to find shelter on trains, in libraries, or inside abandoned buildings.
“We can’t even just stand somewhere,” 19-year-old Quina Rios the Strib. “A transit or cop car will come down, say y’all gotta move. Just every time we see a cop car, everyone’s sprinting.”
Energy-Gobbling Data Centers Are MN’s Future
Massive data centers for the likes of Amazon and Meta are headed Minnesota’s way, and GOP lawmakers are rolling out the red carpet, according to this story from Mary Murphy at the Duluth News Tribune. One bill in the legislature would make the permitting process easier for these centers. Another would give large centers a sales tax break.
These vast server farms have rapacious power needs: They already used 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023 and that number is projected to jump to 6.7-12% by 2028. A data center uses 300,000 gallons of water a day on average—as much as 1,000 homes, NPR reported in 2022.
Though both of the bills mentioned above have bipartisan support, there has been pushback from the DFL side of the aisle. A bill sponsored by Rep. Patty Acomb (DFL-Minnetonka) would regulate water use and impose usage fees. And Sen. Jennifer McEwen (DFL-Duluth) raises the issue that, while tech companies have input into this legislation, they’re unavailable for questions about environmental impact. “A lobbyist, an executive? Nobody? Nobody. Look around. Nobody has stepped up,” she says.
