DOJ: MPD discriminates against Blacks
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On June 16, the Department of Justice released the findings of its multiyear investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). In a press conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that the DOJ has “reasonable cause to believe” that the MPD “engages in a pattern or practice of unlawfully discriminating against Black and Native American people in enforcement activities.” The finding made front-page news in the national press, which declared that the “scathing” report exposed “racist” and “discriminatory” policing.
First consider that, in 2018, MPD arrested nearly 9,000 men but fewer than 3,000 women. Of course, based on this statistic, hardly anyone would conclude the police discriminate against men. A commonsense perspective backed by criminological knowledge suggests that sex differences in criminal behavior account for the disparity.
The careful analyst should apply the same logic when evaluating evidence of racial disparities in law enforcement. Though they constitute 18 percent of the city’s population, blacks were responsible for 88 percent of Minneapolis homicides in which the race of the offender was known to the police. The rate of any violent crime among black Minneapolis residents is 27 times higher than among white residents. Given these massive differences in criminal behavior, the disparities in policing are, if anything, smaller than one might expect: the DOJ found that MPD stops black people 6.5 times more frequently than white people, and that “MPD used force against black people at nine times the rate that it used force against white people, given their shares of the population.” (The last part of the quoted sentence indicates the DOJ considers population size a suitable denominator when assessing disparities in enforcement; yet based on this logic, the MPD discriminates against men.)
What does the DOJ report say about racial differences in criminal offending in Minneapolis? Absolutely nothing. The DOJ Civil Rights Division spent years investigating the MPD but did not bother to examine the nature of the crime problem in the city. The report provides all kinds of auxiliary information about Minneapolis: the reader is told that “the median Black family in the Twin Cities earns just 44% as much as the median white family” and given a detailed account of the history of housing discrimination in the city, which dates back to 1910. Yet the report never recognizes the overrepresentation of African Americans in serious violent crime, both as victims and offenders.
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Again, all the dumbest ideas in America are around race. The ideas are a product of selective thinking like this. It’s all completely transparent, and the silence about how insane it all is, is enforced by credible threat of the socioeconomic death penalty. Everybody knows this.
