Attorney General Merrick Garland came to town yesterday to indict the Minneapolis Police Department for racism, find it guilty, and announce the terms to which municipal authorities have agreed. The Department of Justice press release is here, Garland’s remarks at the press conference here, the DoJ’s 89-page report here, and the parties’ settlement in principle here.

The report results from a DoJ investigation launched in the wake of Derek Chauvin’s conviction of the murder of George Floyd in April 2021. According to the report, the Minneapolis Police Department uses excessive force, including unjustified deadly force, unlawfully discriminates against blacks and Native Americans, violates free speech rights, and discriminates against people with behavioral health disabilities when responding to calls. “The patterns and practices of conduct the Justice Department observed during our investigation are deeply disturbing,” Garland said at the news conference in Minneapolis.

It’s a shame former MPD Chief Medaria Arradondo was absent. Arradondo came up through the ranks to become the department’s first black chief. Did he know he was running a racist department in the years he was responsible for its leadership (2017-2022)? Arradondo could not be reached for comment. At least he goes unmentioned in the panoply of Star Tribune stories covering yesterday’s jamboree.

Greg Pulles is the former general counsel and secretary of TCF Financial Corporation. Greg was available for comment. Greg writes:

Minneapolis is in the middle of a crime tsunami. There are over 4162 car thefts year to date 2023 versus 1889 in year to date 2022 — more than double! Reported violent crime went up over 40 percent 2019-2021. Police enforcement on the other hand went dramatically down – from over 36,000 traffic stops in the year before George Floyd’s death to under 17,000 in the last twelve months, a decline of over 54 percent. Meanwhile the left has waged an unrelenting war on cops since the death of George Floyd. The President, the Governor, the Mayor, and the City Council have all declared that the police are systemically racist.

In the midst of this crime wave, at a time when the population of the city desperately needs more policing rather than less, the Biden Administration has lowered the boom on the Minneapolis Police Department. The Report is another nail in the coffin of active policing in the city, virtually guaranteeing a further decline in the morale of officers and in their numbers. Count on continuing high levels of crime, especially in those predominantly black neighborhoods where more policing is needed most.

There was never any question that the Justice Department investigation would find systemic racism in the Minneapolis Police Department. The report reflects no knowledge of what cops have to go through every day, every shift, every incident — the abuse they suffer, the dangers they face in every encounter, and the depravity of many offenders.

Some of the report is comical: there were a total of 19 police shootings over the six-and-a-half years studied, with over 11,000 uses of force. Instead of giving the department an award for their remarkable restraint in using firearms — .0017 percent of the time they use force — they are accused of gross incompetence and excessive use of force.

And then there is this: “Minneapolis Police Officers shoved adults and teens.” My gosh, they actually shoved people. And this: “We saw…officers handcuff people even when the person was neither a threat nor a flight risk, which can be humiliating.” We certainly wouldn’t want to humiliate anyone.

The core of the charge of discrimination is based on the same old faulty failure to impose complete and proper controls on statistical analysis. The report first cites the meaningless statistic that blacks are stopped in numbers disproportionate to their share of the population. Of course they are. That is because blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime.

Every study ever conducted (including victim surveys) has shown that blacks are arrested in the same proportion as they offend. National studies actually show that the stop-rate for blacks is lower than their violent crime rate would predict. The report is absolutely void of any analysis: in New York we know that blacks commit 2/3 of all violent crime, and comprise 23 percent of the population, yet they account for only 53 percent of all stops. Where is the comparable DOJ review of Minneapolis’s data? It is crime that predicts police activity, not race.

The report finds that blacks are treated differently than similarly situated whites, controlling for the reason, for the stop/use of force, and for the “similar behavior” of the offender. I am quite confident that the statistical analysis did NOT control for all relevant factors that went into the police decision-making. A police officer who makes a stop or uses force has a hundred pieces of information coming at him, some large, some small. Among them might be the number of suspects in the car, how was the car being driven, where it was being driven, where it came from, criminal record of the offender known to the officer, and, most importantly, the demeanor and attitude of the offender.

For “use of force,” the report controlled for just four factors: whether the officer was assaulted, whether the offender engaged in violent or disorderly behavior, whether the suspect fled the police, and whether the suspect possessed a weapon. The closest any of these comes to demeanor is “violent or disorderly behavior” and there is much misconduct such as verbal abuse of the office and the like that could lead a cop, a good cop just doing his or her job, to conclude he has to control the situation by “using force.” I don’t see any elaboration on the precise methodology, or any specific description of the controls, or a statement of statistical significance.

There was no chance, none, that a Department of Justice study would come to any conclusion other than that the Minneapolis Police Department is guilty of racism. This is a dirty shame, for it means that we will keep rolling down the path of the de-policing of Minneapolis. There will be fewer stops as well as more retirements and quits, fewer recruits, fewer arrests and prosecutions. Criminals will be further emboldened to thumb their noses at law enforcement.

The people who live in the poor neighborhoods of Minneapolis will suffer the most, but no one in greater Minneapolis and St. Paul will be immune from the continuing and expanding crime wave now aided and abetted by the Biden Department of Justice and by the continuing war on cops being waged by every Democrat politician in our state.

JOHN adds: Following the death of George Floyd, the claim that Minnesota’s law enforcement system discriminates against blacks gave rise to anti-police “reform” movements not only in this state, but across the country and even around the world. While I understand that the just-released DOJ report purports to use additional metrics, the foundation of such claims of racism is always the disproportion between the percentage of blacks who are arrested, prosecuted and jailed and the percentage of blacks in the general population.

Of course, as Greg Pulles writes, “blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime,” which accounts for their prominence in criminal jurisprudence. The relevant comparison is the percentage of blacks who are arrested and prosecuted to the percentage of blacks in the offender population, not the general population, which in the case of all races is mostly law-abiding.

Beginning in 2022, Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is releasing data on the race of offenders in the various categories of crime. These data allowed David Zimmer, a 33-year veteran of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office and now a Policy Fellow at Center of the American Experiment, to prove conclusively that Minnesota’s criminal justice system does not discriminate against blacks. Rather, the high percentage of blacks who are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and jailed is entirely the result of the number of crimes they commit. In fact, the data show that in comparison with whites, blacks tend to be treated favorably as they make their way through the system.

David’s findings will be presented in the July issue of Thinking Minnesota, which soon will be going to the printer. David will expand on the magazine version in a paper which also will be released soon. I will have more to say about this when David’s charts have been made public.