Ramsey County is Saint Paul, not Minneapolis which is in Hennepin County. People in Saint Paul don’t appreciate being labeled “part of Minneapolis.” There’s a reason they’re called the Twin Cities.
It don’t think you can assume the jury was “very liberal” just because the county votes overwhelmingly Democratic. There certainly are many liberal Democrats here but there are also many centrist and even conservative Democrats, especially on so-called “law and order” issues. Including a lot of “blue lives matter” folks who generally seem to assume the police can do no wrong and that people complaining about excessive use of deadly force either had it coming or are just making it up. Besides, even if a majority of the county is “very liberal” (which I doubt), a jury of 12 is just too small a sample to assume its views represent those of the populace as a whole. Finally, in my experience even many people who would call themselves “very liberal” and strenuously deny that they are racists carry their own implicit racial biases.
That said, I’m not sure whether or how much implicit racial bias played a role in the jury’s deliberations. The standard for convicting a police officer is just incredibly high in Minnesota. And the jury may have been confused as to what “beyond reasonable doubt” means in the context of a criminal trial. One juror told the media afterwards that because they didn’t have indisputable visual evidence that Philando Castile had not “pulled out” his gun as the officer claimed on the witness stand, they couldn’t convict because they still had “reasonable doubt” on that point. Apparently this juror was saying there was no video showing them what went on inside the car before the shooting: the police dashcam video showed only what went on outside the car, and Diamond Reynolds’ video began after the shooting and according to the juror was partially obscured by the car’s armrest. But if you need indisputable video evidence—like the NFL standard for overturning a call by an official—in order to convict, then it would be almost impossible to convict anyone.of almost any crime. I think they had ample evidence to discredit the officer’s claim that Philando had pulled a gun, inter alia because the gun was found buried deep inside Philando’s pocket (not drawn) by other officers arriving on the scene after the shooting; because Philando himself said “I’m not going for it” before being shot, and again after being shot said “I wasn’t going for it”; because Diamond Reynolds, sitting right next to Philando told the officer before the shooting “He’s not going for it” and testified later that he was reaching for his wallet, not for his gun; because the gun wasn’t loaded and therefore Philando would have no reason to brandish it unless his intent was suicide; and because the officer himself can be heard clearly on the police dashcam recording in the immediate aftermath of the shooting saying, “I didn’t know where the gun was,” which flatly contradicts his own later self-serving statement that he “saw a gun” that Philando had “pulled out.”