Minneapolis is living with echoes now: the crack of the blast, the stunned gasps, the ambulance siren fading into the night. In the shadow of Alex Pretti’s killing, the flashbang injury feels less like an isolated incident and more like a breaking point. For many protesters, it confirms a fear that public streets have been quietly reclassified as battlefields, where dissent is treated as a threat to be neutralized rather than a voice to be heard.
Federal officials point to rocks, bottles, and tense standoffs as justification, insisting that force keeps chaos from spiraling out of control. But the slow-motion replay of that single reach toward the device has forced the city to confront a harder truth: when “order” is maintained through explosions and fear, the damage is not just to bodies, but to trust. And once that trust is shattered, no investigation can easily put it ba
