Crackdown on little offenses can help prevent the big ones

Star Tribune
February 28, 2001
Katherine Kersten

Five years ago, our fair city -- known as Murderapolis -- was nationally notorious for its skyrocketing murder rate. Many citizens walked in fear, especially in poor, minority neighborhoods. A few short years later, there's been an astonishing turnaround. Today, crime in Minneapolis is at its lowest level since 1966.
What accounts for this extraordinary change? In January 1998, Minneapolis Police Chief Robert Olson and Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton instituted a new law enforcement initiative called CODEFOR. CODEFOR is a computerized crime-fighting strategy that has proven highly successful elsewhere, most notably in New York City. The program works by concentrating police resources in high-crime areas, employing innovative crime-fighting tactics, and holding officers rigorously accountable for performance.

Sayles Belton and Olson have been happy to take credit for Minneapolis' safer streets. But there's a flip side to CODEFOR's success. The program has stripped the veil from a truth our society is loath to acknowledge: Certain minorities -- particularly low-income blacks -- apparently commit proportionately far more crimes than whites and other racial groups. In Minneapolis, this uncomfortable fact is beginning to draw political flak. Unfortunately, Sayles Belton and Olson seem prepared to leave the city's hard-working street cops holding the bag for the racial fallout of a program their bosses initiated.

Charges began to swirl in January, when Chief Olson released the preliminary results of a six-month study of the race and ethnicity of individuals stopped in Minneapolis for traffic violations. About 34 percent of those stopped were black and about 42 percent were white. (Around 11 percent were other identifiable minorities.) Most racial groups received citations at similar rates; American Indians were the exception, getting fewer. However, minorities were more than twice as likely as whites to be taken into custody.

The department released only raw numbers, which omitted vital information like the neighborhoods where stops took place and the time of day they occurred. Yet on the basis of this incomplete data, Sayles Belton and Olson joined the Minneapolis NAACP and other critics in suggesting that Minneapolis police are employing discriminatory "racial profiling" -- in other words, that they are targeting minorities because of their race, rather than illegal behavior.

To make sense of the dispute about racial profiling, Minneapolis citizens need to understand how CODEFOR works. The program relies, in part, on aggressive enforcement of laws against misdemeanors like graffiti and littering. Officers also focus on stopping drivers who violate the law by speeding, blasting music, or driving cars with faulty equipment, such as broken headlights or mufflers. Drivers who act suspiciously -- shoving something under a seat, for example -- are searched. Those with more serious infractions, like outstanding warrants or no insurance, are taken to jail and booked.

Why focus police resources on misdemeanor crimes? In recent years, criminologists have learned that one of the best ways to prevent major crimes is to stop minor ones. Thugs who pull knives on unwary citizens in dark alleys are hard to catch -- they don't walk around with signs on their foreheads. Generally, however, they have as little regard for laws against small crimes as they do for laws against big ones.

The New York City Transit Police discovered this in 1991, while trying to staunch a wave of violent crime. By targeting fare-evaders and other petty offenders, the police quickly reduced felony crime by more than 30 percent. One in six fare-beaters, it turned out, was carrying a weapon or had an outstanding warrant. In like vein, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was caught because an officer stopped him for having no license plate on his pickup truck.

Critics of the police would prefer to live in a world in which officers arrest people in proportion to their numbers in the population, and where equal numbers of squad cars patrol Kenwood and north Minneapolis. Sadly, the reality is different. If police are to curtail crime, they will inevitably interact more with some racial groups than others.

The statistics are tragic, but undeniable. Nationally, blacks are 12 percent of the population. Yet between 1992 and 1996, they accounted for 58 percent of carjackings. (Whites accounted for 19 percent.) In 1997, blacks represented 56 percent of nationwide arrests for murder, 40 percent for rape, 57 percent for robbery, 37 percent for aggravated assault and 39 percent for motor vehicle theft.

Figures for Minneapolis are similar. In 1998, 66 percent of the victims of Part I crimes -- serious offenses -- identified perpetrators of the crimes against them as black. (Victims of black criminals are also disproportionately black.) Two Minneapolis zip codes, both heavily minority neighborhoods, accounted for 40 percent of the city's assault injuries, but only 16 percent of its population. Not surprisingly, CODEFOR traffic stops are heavily concentrated in neighborhoods like these.

Have increased CODEFOR patrols in high-crime areas led to burgeoning violations of minority citizens' civil rights, as some charge? Quite the opposite, it seems. The truth is, citizen complaints have decreased markedly since CODEFOR began. In short, since 1998, Minneapolis police have accomplished a seemingly impossible feat: They have increased arrests and greatly reduced crime, while simultaneously cutting complaints from the individuals they encounter while enforcing the law.

Unfortunately, there are signs that crime may begin to rise as charges of discriminatory conduct sap police morale. In the first two weeks of February, CODEFOR traffic stops plummeted by 55 percent -- apparently, they fell as much as 80 percent in some high-crime neighborhoods. As one officer explained, "It's dangerous to stop a speeding driver at 2 a.m. If I'm branded a racist when I make the effort, why should I do it?" As traffic stops decrease, crimes like auto theft and robberies are likely to increase. In order to avoid harming their careers, some officers may simply look the other way.

Clearly, police officers should act with professionalism and civility in every encounter with the public. Obviously, they should never stop a citizen solely on the basis of race, nor presume guilt on that basis. Officers who do these things are guilty of a serious crime. But if we hamstring the police with de facto racial quotas, the biggest victims will be the many law-abiding residents of poor, minority neighborhoods. It is they who benefit most from CODEFOR efforts to make their neighborhoods safe for decent folks.

-Katherine Kersten is a director of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.