A Year of Crime Blogging: What I’ve learned

It was a year ago today I wrote this post. It followed after about two weeks after Rambix, the anonymous twin cities crime blogger hung up his cape and called for reinforcements. I had been an avid reader of Rambix’s blog. Next to Lileks bleat it was the first thing I read each morning.
I shared Rambix and most of his other readers’ disgust with the Star Tribune’s coverage of crime news. The Strib, like a lot of other big city dailies constantly exhibited an attitude that it was somehow above crime news reporting. And it made the city look bad to have too much of it in the paper. Crime stories only got prominent placement when there was no other option, such as in high profile cases, like the uptown murder of Michael Zebuhr and the homicide at Block E.

The local alternative media was often no better. Of a radical bent, their position, forged 20 years ago or more was be knee jerk anti-cop. They seemed to exist in a parallel universe.
TV news reporting of crime is actually better in the sense that crimes are reported, with greater frequency and immediacy. The problem there is follow up. But that’s a problem with all TV news reporting, not just about crime.

This city government isn’t serious about fighting crime. If it were, their spending priorities would be a lot different. Mayor Rybak would fund the cops he promised, instead of an office full of PR flaks for himself.

Here is crime in Minneapolis in a nutshell: You’ve got 5 precincts: Downtown (1), Nordeast (2), North (4), and South (3 and 5). 4 is the most dangerous. 5 is the safest. In fact, if you drew a line along Lake Street across 3 and 5 you could see that the farther you get from the line, the safer it is. In contrast, 4 and 2 are areas under siege. 2, with its old ethnic neighborhoods and long time residents has a decided advantage over 4. Neighborhood organizations appear to be strong. It’s no accident that the NECP was founded there and continues to accomplish a great deal. 4 Lacks 2’s social capital and is a haven for gangs, juvenile delinquents and felons, often on their way back to prison. This is the precinct that I live in.

If you’ve read any of the 4th precinct highlights that I’ve posted you’ll see that a lot of the victims are criminals too. They are people who are involved in a shadow economy based on crime (drugs, burglary, prostitution etc.). It must be working for them (even if they are just barely getting by) because they stay stuck there. That is not to say that there aren’t good, peace loving folk living on even the worst blocks who are working in the wider, regular legal economy. In fact, there are some blocks in North which are as safe as any in the safest part of south. But I’ve seen how one “problem house” can turn a whole block into a problem block. It’s much easier to ruin a block than it is to fix one.

Most people who read this blog know that I’m a conservative. And many people make assumptions about what I think the solution to these problems is. I don’t think there are any panaceas. More cops would help. Subsidized development generally fails unless the conditions are already there for success. (In which case, they didn’t really need the subsidy in the first place). The so-called “broken windows” theory is often misinterpreted as crime fighting on the cheap. It’s not, when done as its original exponents at the Manhattan institute intended. It’s actually quite expensive and requires a radical reorientation of city and county government priorities. It’s about creating a zero tolerance zone for any type of crime or code violation, whether it is littering, panhandling, peeling paint or of a more violent sort. It’s about making the justice system tougher but also fairer and making all the laws apply to everybody all the time.
Enforcement is key, but so is adjudication. If the cops arrest a guy on a nuisance charge they have to spend time on the paperwork. If the prosecutor won’t bother with charges then all the time spent in the arrest has been wasted. The nuisance guy is back on the street perhaps the same day, committing the same offenses. A smart cop learns to just walk on by and the smart criminal learns that he’s got game. Seen from this perspective, all parts of the criminal, inspections and justice system have to be aggressive. If any one part doesn’t take its job seriously, doesn’t have enough resources or worse, has a reputation for corruption or laxity, “broken windows” won’t work.

Finally, I have to add one more item to the list of interesting things I’ve learned. Rambix always had interesting commenters. Anonymous commenting allows for lots of people to simply whine away, spouting their most deeply felt prejudices without having to pay the usual cost in social opprobrium. That has remained true on this blog. What I didn’t expect was that people indirectly connected to crimes and victims would comment on the blog. Of course I have no way of knowing whether these people are who they say they are, thanks to anonymous commenting but they give voice to an interesting perspective.

There are two cases in particular that stand out.

Lorenzo London, the teenager convicted of raping a woman at a bus stop. While most of us probably would have seen him as yet another young black male invested in a life of violent criminality, the comments on this blog said otherwise. The guy had had other opportunities, he had people who cared about him and they thought he wasn’t living the ghetto lifestyle anymore. Unfortunately for us all, he chose to go that criminal path. He was such an unlikely suspect that if cameras hadn’t caught his face, the crime might have remained unsolved.

Another case was that of a murder victim, homicide #9 of 2007, Antonio Ford. This guy was shot in a bar fight that was taken outside to the parking lot. A look at his pretty extensive rap sheet suggests that he had a substance abuse problem. He had been in and out of the system over the past several years. Yet, this guy must have had something more going for him because to this day positive comments are left about him. People miss him. How he died and his problems while he was alive weren’t everything there was to know about this guy. When you read stories like this you wonder about the other side of all this violence and what does the younger generation living with it learn from it? We may be getting the answer in a whole new generation of stone-cold killers who at 15 or 16 are already emotionally dead inside. It’s hard to know how to address an issue like that, except stopping the violence from occurring in the first place.

Crime blogging has taught me a lot about human nature, city politics and economics and above all geography. Interest in the topic ebbs and flows. What's considered "bad" seems to vary a lot depending on where you live and there are a lot of hardened expectations about crime. Another homicide in north won't generate the excitement that a spate of burglaries may in South. Minneapolis' intelligentsia seems to live well below Lake Street.

Now, on to some housekeeping issues. This blog was originally called Minneapolis Crime Watch. Max volunteered to post on St. Paul crime but I fear that the task was too much for a guy who had lots of other obligations. If I can't get some more contributors to post on St. Paul, I am going to change the blog title back to the original title to eliminate the false advertising.

I could sure use some help on the Minneapolis side. I am grateful for the help Nordeaster and Chunkstyle have given on the blog. Between Nordeaster and the weekly NECP report, the 2nd precinct gets much much better coverage than I could give it alone. It would be great if we could get some contributors from other parts of the city or more at large contributors. My hours at work have increased which means that I tend to post in spurts when I have time. I try to post every day because every day there is something to say about crime in the Minneapolis. The more contributors on this blog, the more geographical and other perspectives, the better.