[The resignations came after Golden Valley, Minnesota hired its
first Black police chief to begin addressing issues of racial
profiling.]
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HALF THE POLICE FORCE QUIT. CRIME DROPPED.  
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Radley Balko
July 2, 2023
New York Times
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_ The resignations came after Golden Valley, Minnesota hired its
first Black police chief to begin addressing issues of racial
profiling. _

, Image by Antoine Cossé

 

In a staggering report
[[link removed]] last
month, the Department of Justice documented pervasive abuse, illegal
use of force, racial bias and systemic dysfunction in the Minneapolis
Police Department. City police officers engaged in brutality or made
racist comments, even as a department investigator rode along in a
patrol car
[[link removed]].
Complaints about police abuse were often slow-walked or dismissed
without investigation. And after George Floyd’s death, instead of
ending the policy of racial profiling, the police just buried the
evidence.

The Minneapolis report was shocking, but it wasn’t surprising. It
doesn’t read much differently from recent Justice Department reports
about the police departments in Chicago
[[link removed]], Baltimore
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Orleans
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Mo., or any of three recent reports from various sources about
Minneapolis, from 2003
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Amid spiking nationwide homicide rates in 2020 and 2021
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a continuing shortage
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police officers, many in law enforcement have pointed to
investigations like these — along with “defund the
police”-style activism — as the problem. With all the criticism
they are weathering, the argument goes, officers are so hemmed in,
they can no longer do their job right; eventually they quit, defeated
and demoralized. Fewer police officers, more crime.

Lying just below the surface of that characterization is a starkly
cynical message to marginalized communities: You can have accountable
and constitutional policing, or you can have safety. But you can’t
have both.

In accord with that view, some academic studies have found that more
police officers can correlate with less crime. But the studies
don’t [[link removed]] account for factors
that the Minneapolis report highlights — the social costs of police
brutality and misconduct, how they can erode public trust, how that
erosion of trust affects public safety — and they don’t account
for the potential benefits of less coercive, less confrontational
alternatives to the police. We don’t have as many studies that take
those factors into account, but to see the effects in real time, you
need only step over the Minneapolis city line.

Golden Valley
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of about 22,000 that in many ways is as idyllic as its name suggests.
The median annual household income tops $100,000, there’s very
little crime, and 15 percent of the town is devoted to parks and green
spaces, including Theodore Wirth Park on its eastern border, a lush
space that hosts a bike path and a parkway.

But the town’s Elysian charm comes with a dark past. Just on the
other side of the park lies the neighborhood of Willard-Hay
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There, the median household income drops to about $55,000 per year,
and there’s quite a bit more crime. Willard-Hay is 26 percent white
and 40 percent Black. Golden Valley is 85 percent white and 5 percent
Black — the result of pervasive racial covenants
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“We enjoy prosperity and security in this community,” said Shep
Harris, the mayor since 2012. “But that has come at a cost. I think
it took incidents like the murder of George Floyd to help us see that
more clearly.” The residents of the strongly left-leaning town
decided change was necessary. One step was eliminating those racial
covenants. Another was changing the Police Department, which had a
reputation for mistreating people of color.

The first hire was Officer Alice White, the force’s first
high-ranking Black woman. The second was Virgil Green, the town’s
first Black police chief.

“When I started, Black folks I’d speak to in Minneapolis seemed
surprised that I’d been hired,” Chief Green said when I spoke with
him recently. “They told me they and most people they knew avoided
driving through Golden Valley.”

Members of the overwhelmingly white police force responded to both
hires by quitting — in droves.

An outside investigation
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revealed that some officers had run an opposition campaign against
Chief Green. One of those officers recorded herself making a series of
racist comments during a call with city officials, then sent the
recording to other police officers. She was fired — prompting yet
another wave of resignations.

The typical Golden Valley police officer makes a six-figure salary
with good benefits. The city has almost no violent crime. It’s a
good gig. Yet in just two years, more than half the department quit.

“I haven’t been on the job long enough to make any significant
changes,” Chief Green said. “Yet we’re losing officers left and
right. It’s hard not to think that they just don’t want to work
under a Black supervisor.”

The interesting thing is that according to Chief Green, despite the
reduction in staff, crime — already low — has gone down in Golden
Valley. The town plans to staff the department back up, just not
right away. “I’ve heard that the police union is cautioning
officers from coming to work here,” Mr. Harris said. “But that’s
OK. We want to take the time to hire officers who share our vision and
are excited to work toward our goals.”

Mr. Harris is quick to point out that Golden Valley may not be the
perfect model for the rest of the country. “This is a wealthy
community with very little crime,” he said. “We can afford to go
through this change. I realize that may not be the case in other
places.”

There is reason to think it may. When New York’s officers engaged in
an announced slowdown in policing in late 2014 and early
2015, civilian complaints of major crime in the city dropped
[[link removed]]. And despite
significant staffing shortages at law enforcement agencies around the
country, if trends continue, 2023 will have the largest percentage
drop in homicides
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U.S. history. It’s true that such a drop would come after a two-year
surge, but the fact that it would also occur after a significant
reduction in law enforcement personnel suggests the surge may have
been due more to the pandemic and its effects than depolicing.

At the very least, the steady stream of Justice Department reports
depicting rampant police abuse ought to temper the claim that policing
shortages are fueling crime. It’s no coincidence that the cities we
most associate with violence also have long and documented histories
of police abuse. When people don’t trust law enforcement, they stop
cooperating and resolve disputes in other ways. Instead of fighting to
retain police officers who feel threatened by accountability and
perpetuate that distrust, cities might consider just letting them
leave.

_Radley Balko is the author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The
Militarization of America’s Police Forces
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and the criminal justice newsletter The Watch
[[link removed]]._

 

* police reform
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* Minnesota
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* Racism
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