On June 16, the Department of Justice released the findings of its multiyear investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). In a press conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that the DOJ has “reasonable cause to believe” that the MPD “engages in a pattern or practice of unlawfully discriminating against Black and Native American people in enforcement activities.” The finding made front-page news in the national press, which declared that the “scathing” report exposed “racist” and “discriminatory” policing. We read the report with keen interest, knowing how challenging it is to demonstrate discrimination, especially with non-experimental data. The report contains glaring oversights that overturn its conclusions.

First consider that, in 2018, MPD arrested nearly 9,000 men but fewer than 3,000 women. Of course, based on this statistic, hardly anyone would conclude the police discriminate against men. A commonsense perspective backed by criminological knowledge suggests that sex differences in criminal behavior account for the disparity. …

What does the DOJ report say about racial differences in criminal offending in Minneapolis? Absolutely nothing. The DOJ Civil Rights Division spent years investigating the MPD but did not bother to examine the nature of the crime problem in the city. The report provides all kinds of auxiliary information about Minneapolis: the reader is told that “the median Black family in the Twin Cities earns just 44% as much as the median white family” and given a detailed account of the history of housing discrimination in the city, which dates back to 1910. Yet the report never recognizes the overrepresentation of African Americans in serious violent crime, both as victims and offenders.

[As a long-term suburban resident of the Twin Cities, everyone I knew had some anecdote about MPD behavior; those issues had been part of the political discussion for years before George Floyd. The problem, however, was less about racism than a lack of accountability and responsibility, primarily at the Minneapolis city council. Politicians in the city got into bed with the public employee unions decades ago, and the result was collusion between PEUs and the council rather than accountability. That’s why the city council tried to wash their hands of the MPD in the Floyd scandal and insist on defunding and even dismantling MPD in favor of passing the buck to Hennepin County for law enforcement. This is just another attempt to let the city council off the hook for its core task of managing public safety properly. — Ed]