Last week, I ventured into a Minneapolis mystery bookstore to hear William Swanson read from Black White Blue: the nonfiction account of a St. Paul police officer killed in the line of duty forty years ago. The next morning, I learned that a man in Minneapolis had shot and killed five people, injuring several others, at his former place of employment, before killing himself.

Two things struck me: at the reading, the audience responded forcefully to the story of the assassinated officer and the subsequent legal case, but they didn't seem as interested in the tumultuous cultural environment in which the crime took place. And in Friday morning's paper, it was a line spoken by the Minneapolis Deputy Police Chief: "This is something we see on the news in other parts of the country, not here in Minneapolis."

For me, such a statement only conveys a desire to separate one's sense of regional identity from unwanted behavior. It communicates, most immediately, I am afraid.

The audience at the bookstore was, I can only assume, typical of nonfiction crime fans: most sat in bright, inquisitive attention as they asked about the specifics of the legal proceedings and the author's access to sources. The murder described in Black White Blue seems to have been entirely sociopolitically motivated: the State's case claimed the perpetrator was vying for the attention of the Black Panthers by orchestrating the shooting of a random white cop. Yet beyond a general description of the seventies as tumultuous, full of police brutality and politically very active (shit being blown up, etc.), very few specifics were brought up about the particular racial climate in St. Paul at the time.

At one point, Swanson said that in addition to the chaos, it was a rather exciting and liberating time, and the one black man in the audience pointed out that it wasn't exactly exciting and liberating for others in the community. I sensed that few attendees wanted to get anywhere near talking about the racism or police brutality or segregation or inequality. In this case, "not here" suggests a different kind of avoidance from the kind the Deputy Police Chief conjured after last week's shooting. But it could've been uttered just the same.

There is likely no better way to write nonfiction crime than to focus on a central character or pinnacle case around which everything else can be explored. Since last Thursday, the local papers have been focusing on two central characters: the shooter, Andrew Engeldinger, and his boss (who had fired Engeldinger that afternoon), Reuven Rahamim. Without fail, this story will be compared to other office shootings and other mass shootings, Colorado no doubt on the top of the list. I won't be surprised when op-eds begin to spring up about modern mental health practices and accessibility, the desperation of the economy, gun control. And other attempts at feeling productive after an event for which there is nothing to be done.

We will come together as a community and be defined by our response, our social activism, our Minnesotan sense of civic duty. Meanwhile, it might help if we stopped trying to cast certain behaviors as un-Minnesotan, so we could be able to move just a little further forward.

Image: Stringer/Reuters

For reasons unknown to me, this story about a St. Paul man threatening a 62 year-old woman with a sword over a borrowed book has gotten way toomuch press. As a fan of St. Paul, and in the spirit of promoting the Midwest as a fairly decent place to write, I’d like to dwell on some of the story’s finer aspects.

Books matter to Midwesterners. As far as I can tell, the whole ruckus began when the suspect threw the book he had borrowed onto the floor, and the kindly loaner of the book gave him a little shit about it. Not only does the woman here acknowledge the value of books by suggesting they don’t belong on the floor, but the borrower, by his swift decision to get a weapon, suggests that he, too, knows the import involved here. If the guy didn’t think it was a big deal to throw a book on the floor, why would he bother brandishing a sword? It hard to imagine any of this happening over a Gilmore Girls DVD.

Midwesterners have Scandinavian impulses regardless of whether they are actually Scandinavian, and Scandinavians are insanely afraid of getting called out on something they did poorly. Scandinavians are also almost godlike in their ability to bring shame on others. We have here the genius of seemingly innocent Midwestern passive aggression: the woman suggested he just throw the book away if he were going to leave it on the floor. She doesn’t accuse him directly of doing something shitty but suggests that he might as well have done something shittier. Most people have likely expected the worst from him his entire life. And the poor guy, who later in jail admits he is an idiot, can’t help but get emotional: he, too, is caught up in the Scandinavian shame cycle.

And then there's his choice of weapon. A sword. Really? Most people I hang around with aren’t really prone to take an unsheathed sword as a threat. A gun? Sure. A big knife? Oh yes (more on that in a second). But a sword? From a kid who also has ninja stars and nunchucks? If it weren’t for the sword, there would be no story. Whatever the guy’s intentions, he has succeeded in provoking a great amount of curiosity. He might not be a good neighbor, or a good criminal, but he has proven that minor criminals can still surprise us, and that sometimes people’s small quirks get the most attention.

Saturday's frightening incident in Times Square lies on the opposite end of the blade-wielding spectrum. While our book borrower's actions provoked lots of trashy curiosity, the killing of Darrius Kennedy brings up a whole lot of actual fear. His standoff with the cops, the bystanders, and the rolling cameras of a hundred smartphones was not funny; it was chaotic and very sad. For all we know, both men might have begun with the same small, dumb impulse: a trigger response to a mix of panic, fear, helplessness. Our book borrower only briefly acted on the impulse. Mr. Kennedy took it to the limit.

Image: faildaily.blogspot.com