The ACLU did great work on studying the problems facing minorities in Minneapolis.
https://www.aclu.org/...
When Officer Rod Webber quickly approached the car that Hamza Jeylani was sitting in, the 17-year-old hit record on his cell phone. Moments earlier, Jeylani and three friends were pulled over by the officer after making a U-turn in a church parking lot in South Minneapolis after playing basketball at the local YMCA. After Jeylani and two friends were ordered out of the car, Webber threatened Jeylani as he handcuffed him.
“Plain and simple, if you fuck with me,” says Webber on the video, “I’m going to break your legs before you get the chance to run.” “Can you tell me why I’m being arrested?” asks Jeylani. “Because I feel like arresting you,” replies Webber.
The statistics are horrible - blacks are nearly 9x as likely to be arrested for low level offenses. 33 kids 10 and younger were charged with curfew violations - 28 of them were minorities. One was 4 years old.
Bringing youth into the criminal justice system at an early age does not protect them from victimization or deter future criminal behavior. Rather it makes them more likely to stay in the criminal justice system throughout their childhood and into adulthood.
The study showed how police use low level crimes to arrest minorities. And it turns out that an individual officer can make a huge difference.
some officers police low-level offenses far more aggressively than others. As the graphic to the right illustrates, a small number of officers made an outsized number of low-level arrests between January 1, 2012, and September 30, 2014. Eight officers made more than 1,000 arrests during this period. The officer who made the most low-level arrests racked up 2,026. The subsequent seven officers made between 1,001 and 1,128 low-level arrests. As the map below shows, a huge portion of these officers’ arrests occurred in North Minneapolis.
However, while those officers can make a large volume of arrests, they don't offset the racism found in the study.
Even when the arrests of the top eight arresting officers are dropped from the data, significant racial disparities remain. Without these top eight arresting officers, Black people were 8.5 times more likely to be arrested for a low-level offense than white people
While the police are a big part of the problem, it's the whole system that is broken.
Judge Burke explains how the criminal justice system treats different types of people unequally: "We take people — largely people of color — and we say, 'If you're drunk or sleeping on the light rail to the Mall of America, we will charge you and make a condition of your probation [that] you cannot ride the light rail.”
He observes, however, that the criminal justice system doesn’t extend this logic to the wealthier people of Hennepin County’s suburbs. “If you're rich and you're coming from Wayzata and you drive 90 miles an hour down 35W, we don't say, 'You can't drive on the freeway anymore', because you're rich and you're white and you've got a Mercedes.”
This disparity of treatment is systemic in nature. “It's the whole system,” he says, “that just is kind of topsy-turvy when it comes to poor people who are people of color." The result: Poor Minneapolitans of color pay more dearly for the mistakes they make than more affluent white citizens do.
Because of the efforts of the ACLU (both nationally and the state affiliate), today the city of Minneapolis repealed the crimes of lurking and spitting.
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