On an unseasonably warm fall Friday in Minneapolis, Mike Norton paused along the Bryant Avenue bike path to snap a photo of a magnificently yellow tree. Another city scene added to the tens of thousands stored on his camera roll, a chronicle of Norton’s one-man social media quest to improve his city’s reputation.
Norton shares these Minneapolis scenes, of its lakes and protected bike lanes and other quality-of-life drivers, on his locally popular X account. It’s a way for the former DFL activist and one-time City Council candidate to push back against some of the negativity around safety and livability in Minneapolis that began to emerge in earnest after the unrest that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020. President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have helped keep those outsider perceptions alive with their own critical election-season comments about Minnesota’s largest city.
“It was basically like trolling people that don’t live in Minneapolis, but want to tell you how things are in Minneapolis, it was kind of a clapback,” said Norton, 40, who lives in southwest Minneapolis and owns a small shipping-container business in Uptown. “This is what it’s like, actually. This is my experience every day.”
In 2020, gun violence and other crimes surged to record levels in Minneapolis. Those rates remain above pre-pandemic levels. But in 2022 and 2023, violent crime fell in the city, even after an exodus of Minneapolis police officers that started in 2020.
Norton said the intent of his initial pushback posts was to help restaurants and other businesses that rely on customers from beyond the city limits at a time when even residents of neighboring suburbs, much less farther away, seemed convinced that Minneapolis was little more than a smoldering ruin.
Norton’s political allegiance has likely fueled some of the online trolling his chronicling has generated. He is a past vice chair of the Minneapolis DFL, and in 2021 he unsuccessfully challenged City Council Member Linea Palmisano from the left. Simple statements he makes in his posts, like “Minneapolis is a lovely place to live,” alongside photos or videos from his bicycle commute to work, are often derided with police siren emojis and assertions that he is in denial.
When Vance visited in October and held a news conference in front of the shuttered Third Precinct police station, he portrayed Minneapolis as a city in decline. Residents, he said, told him that with Gov. Tim Walz in office, their quality of life had declined and that Minneapolis was “overrun with crime.”
The local internet responded with outrage, largely mimicking Norton’s understated cheerleading. City residents posted photos from around Minneapolis paired with quotes from Vance’s speech. Mayor Jacob Frey put up a video of his own, showing him on a jog around a Minneapolis lake and noting that violent crime in the city has declined.