‘Baseless and outrageous claims’ from senator triggered by criminal justice analysis

Democratic politicians in Minnesota will be the last ones in the country to come to grips with the political realignment that’s occurring with President Donald Trump’s return to the White House. As the federal government roots out harmful DEI programs, scrutinizes wasteful spending, closes the border, and removes criminal illegal aliens, Democrats in St. Paul will stubbornly pretend nothing has changed. Even when major Minnesota corporations like Target abandon woke ideologies in favor of the bottom line, Minnesota Democrats will miss the memo. 

Enter Sen. Erin Maye Quade, a Democrat from Apple Valley. Sen. Maye Quade attacked Center of the American Experiment this week for our report on race in Minnesota’s criminal justice system. Here’s what she said:

“One of the days last week a Republican Senator invited the Center for [sic] the American Experiment to present a report about how black people are more violent than white people and that’s why they’re arrested at higher rates and incarcerated.”

Where to begin? Obviously, Sen. Maye Quade misrepresents everything about our report. I could suggest she didn’t read it, but that gives her too much credit. Whether she read it or not, Maye Quade is just using the report to make baseless and outrageous claims about race in Minnesota.

The report was authored by American Experiment Policy Fellow David Zimmer, who came to us after a 33-year career in law enforcement with Hennepin County. Zimmer uses data from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) to determine how black offenders and white offenders were treated by the system. The report makes no claims about violence.

The report analyzed 2022 crime data collected by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) that showed black Minnesotans committed 35% of all serious crimes (murder, felony assault, robbery, weapon crimes, felony drug crimes, and rape). These are the official numbers from a Minnesota state government agency. In 2022, when adjusted for population share, that means that serious criminal offenders in Minnesota were 11 times more likely to be black than white — up from the ratio of 10:1 in 2021.

The report showed that once black offenders enter the criminal justice system through arrest, the system is more likely to “self-correct,” leading to more punitive outcomes for white offenders. Counter to the political narrative put forward by race-baiters like Maye Quade, the report finds the system is more favorable to black offenders and less favorable to white offenders at every stage, including incarceration.

The report delineates the important difference between racial “disproportions,” which do exist in the data, and unwarranted racial “disparities,” which do not exist in Minnesota’s criminal justice system when it comes to serious crimes.

One major conclusion of the report is that black Minnesotans are much more likely to be the victim of serious crime in Minnesota than white Minnesotans. If Sen. Maye Quade really cared about helping people of color, she would dig into this data and figure out what policy changes could be made to lower black victimization. Don’t hold your breath for that to happen. 

Maye Quade went on in her press conference to say Republican legislators are “permeating a racial hierarchy” by “taking the mantle that white people are better than people of color, there should be a racial hierarchy in society, that’s coming down from the top at the Federal government and Republicans in this chamber and obviously in the House are picking it up and running with it.”

That is delusional. Serious policy discussions require serious people. Sen. Erin Maye Quade proved yesterday she is not a serious person.