Despite recent claims by the Star Tribune Editorial Board that prohibiting low-level offenses such as lurking and spiting ensures the "livability" of downtown ("Banish bias, but keep downtown livable," March 23), the data tell a different story. Such ordinances significantly reduce the quality of life for communities of color in Minneapolis — not just in the downtown area, but in heavily policed neighborhoods as well.
The racial gulfs revealed by this data are long-standing and, given the origins of said laws, unsurprising. The historical connection between low-level offenses (e.g. lurking, vagrancy) and racialized policing is well-established. These laws emerged when Slave Codes became Black Codes.
From the outset, they were intended to circumscribe the lives of African-Americans. Low-level and "livability" crimes were central features of the old Jim Crow era, and remain today — in the New Jim Crow era — as pretextual police tools in racial profiling.
Recent reports from the Minnesota ACLU verified yet again, using the Minneapolis Police Department's own data, that blacks are targeted for low-level arrests. (The results were replicated by a new report from the Minneapolis Police Department, which further revealed that when victims or witnesses are involved in reporting, they are overwhelmingly white).
These practices persist despite a substantial literature that documents no racial differences in committing such low-level offenses. It persists too in lieu of an official name such as "stop and frisk" or "broken windows," yet the net effect is the same.
The data revealed that between 2004 and 2012, an African-American was, on average:
• 11.5 times more likely to be arrested than a white individual for marijuana possession;
• 8.86 times more likely to be arrested than a white individual for disorderly conduct;