What to make of ‘A Precarious State,’ the new film that sees Minneapolis through a dark lens

Coming one month before a city election that could tip the balance of power in Minneapolis City Hall, a new documentary from former KARE-11 anchor Rick Kupchella paints a dark picture of the state’s largest city while taking aim at several City Council members on issues ranging from taxes to commercial real estate, migration to the city’s business climate.

Billed as a public education campaign, the film, “A Precarious State,” has drawn some 300,000 views on YouTube and aired statewide on ABC affiliates last week as a paid advertisement.

Asked if it was released to influence city elections, Kupchella, in an interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune, said it wasn’t, but he also said it was necessary to release the film while it was still relevant.

The film doesn’t interview or mention Mayor Jacob Frey, who’s battling several challengers for a third term, but a woman who appeared in the documentary told the Star Tribune she agreed to be in it after she was told it would portray Frey in a positive light.

Kupchella won’t say who paid for the film, though he did tell the Forum of Fargo-Moorhead that it was produced with the help of “business and community leaders.” He said donors weren’t eager to come forward publicly in today’s supercharged political climate. “I think it’s a very important story that we uncovered here,” he said in an interview.

Here’s what to know if you watch:

A graphic video of a 2024 gun battle at 19th Street and Nicollet Avenue airs several times as Kupchella or others quoted in the film say the city is run by gangs, that there’s “open warfare on the streets” and that the gun battle is “the new normal.”

It’s true that crime exploded in Minneapolis after the pandemic, as it did elsewhere, and that some categories of crime, including homicides, still remain higher than pre-pandemic levels. But in other categories police have made progress: Motor vehicle thefts are down since 2023, and carjacking is also down sharply since it peaked in 2022.

Kupchella told the Star Tribune that it’s misleading to compare crime stats of today with those from when the “city was on fire.” He said he didn’t mention burglary rates because he was looking at serious crime or crimes that, like vandalism, served as gateways to further crime.

In the film, the crime stats lead to a discussion of police funding and a claim that the City Council is actively working to cut the police budget. The council did cut the budget in 2021, but it has overseen a series of increases in police spending since then, from $170 million four years ago to $234 million budgeted today.

Kupchella’s central argument is that Minneapolis is being mis-served by politicians aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America. City Council Member Robin Wonsley, in particular, is framed as the leader of the City Council’s progressive wing and someone harboring radical ideas.

“She doesn’t believe in capitalism; she wants the government to own it all,” says Carol Becker, a writer for the Minneapolis Times website who’s long known for sparring with the city’s progressive wing and who serves as one of the film’s main commentators.

Wonsley is never interviewed, nor are her supporters. Kupchella said he read her campaign website, but it’s not summarized in the film.

Wonsley initially told the Star Tribune that Kupchella didn’t ask her for an interview. Kupchella said he did. Wonsley replied that he sent an email telling her he was working on a “public education campaign” that would use “video storytelling” to better understand the DSA’s rise. Thinking the Twin Cities DSA was in a better position to help him, Wonsley referred Kupchella to the DSA.

“At no point was it indicated that the project involved a documentary or focused on policies at City Hall,” Wonsley said.

Kupchella said he wanted to show viewers the nature of the DSA and focused instead on a political platform he found on the website of the national Democratic Socialists of America. It says among other things that the DSA wants to free all incarcerated people, abolish prisons, end all misdemeanor offenses and cut funding for prosecutors.

Wonsley said some of the claims attributed to her were “comical.” “What incarcerated individuals have I freed?” she asked.

Kupchella, in an interview, insisted that the national DSA’s document was significant. “It’s the mothership,” he said. “We told the story of the organization that [Wonsley] is aligned with.”

Though the documentary has a lot to say about Minneapolis, it also looks at Minnesota students’ test scores, with the film’s big takeaway being that a majority of students are failing science, reading and math.

That’s a misinterpretation of how the state assessment works, said Elsa Mundt, educational data analyst and assessment supervisor for the Stillwater Area Public Schools District. The reading and math assessments are adaptive, meaning they will get easier or harder as the student progresses in order to determine what the student is capable of, said Mundt. It’s not like a test where a pass or fail grade is handed out.

“The goal [of the MCAs] is to describe what students can do,” she said. “It’s tempting maybe to use the language of passing and failing, but it’s a little different than grading. Failing is a simplification.”

The distinction is easy to gloss over, and even after it was described to Kupchella in an interview, he stuck by his assertion that some 74 percent of Minnesota students are failing science.

The documentary found data that shows people moving out of the state, focusing on the years 2022 to 2024, and honed in: “We’ve never had this massive amount of migration, so much, so quickly, leaving the state of Minnesota,” says former Republican state legislator Pat Garofalo.

The finding serves as a pivot to a discussion about the state’s income tax, which takes the blame for the outward migration. It’s true at least that the state has seen a steady pattern of more people moving out than moving in, said state demographer Susan Brower.

Yet that’s been the case in almost every year since at least 2006. The moves are made for a wide variety of reasons and can’t be attributed only to public policies or quality of life factors, she said.

The state’s population has grown since the 1940s due to new births and international arrivals that make up for the outflow of domestic migrants. It’s also true that Minnesota is growing more slowly than it has in the past due to a slowdown in birth rates seen not only here but also across the Midwest, Brower said.

The city of Minneapolis isn’t what it used to be, AK Kamara laments at one point in “A Precarious State.” Kamara, a member of the Republican National Committee, is identified only as a local business owner. (His business is registered to an address in Forest Lake.)

The film gets this part right, but it doesn’t mention some of the pockets of strength in local real estate.

The vacancy rate for the industrial sector, including warehouses and distribution centers, in the Twin Cities is much lower than the national average even as investment in that sector booms. And home buying remains strong, especially in Minneapolis, where sale price gains this fall outpaced the broader metro. This summer, home values in the metro posted the ninth biggest gain in the nation even as values nationwide eked out only small gains, according to the oft-watched S&P Cotality Case-Shiller Index.

The city’s housing market gets a mention when Becker, the Minneapolis Times writer, says the city is dead last for housing starts. There’s a reason for that, said Nick Erickson, senior director of housing policy at Housing First Minnesota. It’s more expensive to build homes here than it is in neighboring states, or even Chicago, and local governments have stalled or blocked the construction of starter homes.

“Our housing production decline in the Twin Cities metro is far greater than we’re seeing across the country from 2021 to 2024,” Erickson said.

In the film, commercial real estate investor Erin Fitzgerald shared with Kupchella her frustration at the state of the business environment in Minneapolis. She has oriented her business around buying up distressed commercial property to convert to housing, retail or mixed-use, but she’s finding better deals in Washington, D.C., and Denver, thanks to local government incentives in those cities that help investors pay for the pricey conversions. She’s lobbied for a similar tax credit in Minnesota, adding that Mayor Frey has been an ally.

Fitzgerald said she was bothered by Kupchella’s negative portrayal of Minneapolis but happy to see some of its messages come to light. “I feel like the documentary is getting a lot of messages out there that need to be told, but it painted Minneapolis in much worse light than what it is and some of that falls unfairly on Mayor Frey, because he has been doing an excellent job of leading the city and he is not the problem.”