Downtown Minneapolis crime - some offended by stats

In a July 9, 2005 Red Star article, on the "Safe Zone", reporter David Chanen details the apparent drop in serious crime following an initiative which, among other things, puts more officers on the street, has more officers walking beats, focuses on chronic offenders, and has something called "roving concierges". In other words, they're dumping more resources into the hot spots. Not an unproven strategy, but it cannot be sustained indefinitely because of finite funding. Other initiatives:

"The City Attorney's Office recently developed several changes to respond more effectively to misdemeanors. Public urination and drug paraphernalia possession were added to the list of offenses that require a court date, and misdemeanor offenders are no longer automatically released without bail. Homeless offenders get an immediate court date to decrease the chance that their case will result in a warrant for not appearing."

The interesting part is that Mr. Chanen, or the editor, inserts what appears to be an unsourced opinion into the news article:

"While the report said the results were promising, it also raised concerns that 70 percent of the people arrested were black and that 60 percent of the alleged offenders who received citations didn't pay fines or appear in court."

Raised concerns by whom? By the reporter? By the Red Star editor?

If police are out arresting those folks who choose criminal behavior, and if 70% of those same people are black, isn't the issue the high rate of criminal behavior among blacks in the given area? The concern over the high number of black arrests in this case should result in introspection in the black community over the anti-social behavior of such a large percentage of blacks proportional to their representation in the downtown Minneapolis area, not how many blacks the police "choose" to arrest.

Facts are facts. When the police are under the microscope, as they are, all they want to do is arrest the criminals. If the criminals turn out to be a large part of one racial makeup or another, then we shouldn't in the least insinuate that it has anything to do with the choices the police make as to who to arrest, which is what the Red Star is doing - and we'll tell you the reason.

As noted on numerous occasions throughout this blog, the Red Star is a champion of minimizing, sympathizing with, and justifying, criminals and criminal behavior. Here's the explanation of how they do it. Instead of saying "it also raised concerns that 70 percent of the people arrested were black", they should say "it also raised concerns that 70 percent of the people committing the crimes were black".

See how that works? In the printed paragraph, the reporter mininizes the behavior of the black suspect. The police are essentially implicated for arresting too many blacks. In the Rambix edited quote, the blame for the criminal action falls squarely on the criminal, which is where it should be. It's not about the police, or race, it's about the criminal behavior.

This is how the Strib twists reporting and engages in social engineering. And that is why Rambix is here, to make sure they don't get away with it.