Black People in Minneapolis Nine Times More Likely to Be Arrested for Petty Crime

By Nicky Woolf, Guardian UK

30 May 15

ACLU study finds big racial disparities in city’s policing. Low-level offenses lead to 8.6 times as many arrests for Native Americans.

lack people in Minneapolis are 8.7 times more likely to be arrested for low-level offenses than white people, according to an investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The research into racial disparities in policing also found that native American people were 8.6 times more likely to be arrested for low-level offenses than white people.

White youth, however, while making up 40% of the city’s youth population, accounted for only 14% of youth arrests.

The findings are based on Minneapolis police department figures, secured through a freedom of information request, on more than 96,000 low-level arrests between 1 January 2012 and 30 September 2014.

The research comes after one teenager’s encounter with the police was captured on a cellphone in which a police officer in the city is filmed telling him: “Plain and simple: if you fuck with me, I’m gonna break your legs before you get a chance to run.”

The footage was captured by 17-year-old Hamza Jeylani. Faysal Mohamed, who was in the car with Jeylani when he was arrested, told the ACLU that he had been detained several times. “I have to watch my back because the police are targeting me and targeting people like me,” he said.

Forty percent of all youth arrests were for curfew violations; Minneapolis teenagers between 15 and 17 must be home by 11pm on weekdays, and midnight on weekends. But despite 40% of the city’s youth population being white, white youth made up only 17% of curfew charges – 56% of which were against black youth.

“In poor and minority neighborhoods of Minneapolis, the police aren’t seen as guardians who serve and protect,” the report says. “Rather police officers are viewed suspiciously as oppressors who harass and arrest.”

The study also discovered huge disparities in numbers of low-level arrests made by individual officers. The median number citywide for low-level arrests, the study shows, was 51; but the officer with the highest number racked up an astonishing 2,026 arrests in that time-period, and the next seven made just over a thousand each – the vast majority of them in poor black neighbourhoods.

“The Minneapolis Police Department’s own data speaks for itself: To be a person of color in the city is to be over policed, with law enforcement aggressively arresting people for low-level offenses. The damage in turn is twofold: police-community relations are destroyed and public safety suffers,” said the report, though it commended Minneapolis’s police chief, Janee Harteau, for introducing “implicit bias training” and a pilot project for body cameras in the city.

Emma Andersson, a staff attorney at the criminal law reform project at the ACLU and one of the authors of the project, told the Guardian that “the stark racial disparities in this data reaffirm and strengthen my resolve to keep calling out injustices and keep doing what I can to make the reality of policing in this country live up to our ideals.”

“These disparities are unacceptable and this analysis adds to a growing body of ACLU data analyses that demonstrate that law enforcement across the nation are over and inequitably policing communities of color and that police practices are in need of sweeping reform,” Andersson said.

Nekima Levy-Pounds, a professor of law at the University of St Thomas in Minneapolis, and president of the city’s branch of the NAACP, told the Guardian that she applauded the ACLU for their analysis. “It’s very disturbing to see that African Americans and Native Americans continue to face oppression within our criminal justice system,” she said. “I think that the results of the ACLU’s findings show that there is a need to overhaul our system of policing.”

Neither Minneapolis police department nor the office of the mayor responded to a request by the Guardian for comment.