Minneapolis police are boosting patrols around synagogues and Jewish community centers during the ongoing High Holy Days, amid a global rise in anti-Semitic threats and violence.

“I am concerned with all the hateful rhetoric that is online,” Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Saturday at a City Hall news conference. “I am concerned that there could be a lone actor out there that could see something online and be inspired to commit an act of violence in our community.”

Already police have arrested a man on suspicion of making terroristic threats for reportedly carrying a gun outside Temple Israel in Minneapolis last week — and authorities say the 21-year-old had previously called in threats to shoot up the synagogue using a voice-masking app.

The man has not yet been charged for the incident which occurred during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year that began at sundown Thursday. The holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, starts Friday and ends Saturday.

O’Hara said that a gun has not been recovered and that police didn’t have evidence “to suggest that this incident was anti-Semitic in nature or motivated by hateful bias.” He said there were no ongoing direct threats to which the increased patrols are responding.

However, he said, “the police department has been seeing an enhanced level of threats towards our Jewish community over the last year,” and is especially mindful of the impending anniversary Monday of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists that killed nearly 1,200 people.

Mayor Jacob Frey, who is Jewish, said he was at Temple Israel with his wife during Rosh Hashanah.

“We all have an obligation here not just to act with peace, but to encourage peace from our neighbors, regardless of what happens around the world,” he said.

As Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump begin the final 30-day push for the White House, they are locked in a neck-and-neck race from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt.

With polling averages showing all seven battleground states nearly tied, many Democrats believe their biggest advantage may be an extensive ground game operation that their party has spent more than a year building across the country. Trump’s campaign thinks that recent events — the escalating conflict in the Middle East and deadly hurricanes that have killed more than 200 people across the Southeast — will give it an edge in the final weeks.

In some ways, the two approaches mirror the final days of the 2016 race, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign boasted about a massive, data-driven field organization, while Trump pressed a national message based on stoking anti-immigrant sentiment and improving the economy with a relatively meager staff and almost no field operation in the key states. Trump, of course, prevailed, helped by the FBI director’s reopening of an inquiry into the Democratic nominee’s emails.

This time, Democrats have no such overconfidence. Although Trump and his party have lost or underperformed in every major election since then, many Democrats believe this year is one they could lose.

“Anybody would be a fool to write Trump off,” said Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor who ran for president in 2020. “I think she’s going to win, but am I absolutely sure she’s going to win? No. The 2016 experience taught all of us that you can’t count this guy out.”

Veterans of presidential campaigns say this year’s contest is distinct for how little impact major political events seem to be having on the relative standing of the two candidates. Two assassination attempts on Trump, a presidential and vice presidential debate and the party conventions have brought both him and Harris temporary bumps in support but no enduring shifts in public opinion.

The result is what top officials in both campaigns describe as a grind-it-out race, where movements measured in a few thousand votes could sway the outcome of the entire election.

Ralph Reed, a socially conservative activist in Georgia who is helping turn out voters for the Trump campaign, said he could not recall a presidential race since 2000 in which so many states were effectively tied this late in the campaign.

Sullivan argued that Clapp’s central dispute with the school district was about the policies in the contract, not any incidental money that might be spent to put them into practice. He said that the law was designed for taxpayers to protect themselves from the injury of an increased tax burden resulting from illegal government expenses. There would be “virtually no limit” to taxpayers’ ability to file legal challenges to government policies if they can sue over the incidental funds used to implement policies, he said.

Justice Paul Thissen asked if the school district had spent money to implement the new contract provisions. Sullivan said no. Minneapolis Public Schools has not laid off a teacher in 14 years, he said. Justice Karl Procaccini asked who would have standing to challenge the legality of the new contract provisions if taxpayers did not.

“If the language were to be utilized in a manner that a teacher believed that they were being discriminated against on the basis of a protected characteristic, that teacher would have standing to challenge the application of the language,” Sullivan said.

Michael Bekesha, an attorney with the Washington, D.C.-based conservative foundation Judicial Watch, argued on Clapp’s behalf.The justices repeatedly asked him what made this case different from the taxpayer standing issue in Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Hunt.

Bekesha argued that the contract provision was illegal, and therefore any funds used to implement it were being illegally spent. “The Minnesota equal protection guarantee prohibits governments from making decisions, from taking actions, exclusively, only, based on race,” Bekesha argued.

Hudson suggested that Clapp’s disagreements with the school district focused on policy, not funds.