Neighborhood Meeting
So I went to the neighborhood meeting in Fluffy's neighborhood on Thursday the 10th; the bookstore that she own and was robbed in is in the neighborhood, and another friend lives there, and asked me to go.

The Sector

The city of Minneapolis is divided, for police purposes, into precincts, and each precinct is divided into five sectors. This neighborhood is the Sector 3 of Precinct 3. Precinct 3 is the largest of Minneapolis' five precincts; Sector 3 is the largest sector in the city of Minneapolis.  The particular neighborhood we're talking about falls across official Minneapolis city neighborhood lines -- think of it as the three blocks north and south, two blocks east and west of the corner of 33rd Avenue and 54th Street.

The Problem

It's pretty bad.

The problem in the neighborhood isn't just Fluffy's attack, although that's certainly gotten a lot of publicity, and understandably so. There's a real crime wave going on. One of the things that the MPD SAFE civilian
handed out was a list of recent crimes in a part of the sector -- 33rd Avenue to 36th; 50th Street to 57th, an area only four blocks wide and eight long.

It was pretty lengthy -- while each crime was given only one line, just the list for the past few months in that small chunk of real estate was a full three pages long, and included eight robberies, quite a few auto thefts, as well as the string of house and garage burglaries that have gotten a fair amount of attention of late.

The robberies, in particular, seem to be getting more brazen; one of them took place right across the street from the church where the meeting was held, just about a week before. Maybe I'll go into the details some other time, but it was pretty bad, and could easily have been worse.

What we had was a room filled with people who are, understandably, scared. The robberies, the daylight burglaries, the assaults -- they've got reason to be concerned, and they showed up in enough quantity to fill the basement of the church.

The Cop

The Sector 3 Lieutenant, John Kelly, is also in charge of Sector 4, right next door.

Lieutenant Kelly was at the meeting, and spoke at some length. For what it's worth, he came across to me a serious guy, and in talking to a reporter of my acquaintance, he's apparently thought to be and up-and-coming officer in the department -- straightforward but politically adept, good leadership and listening skills, and so forth. I certainly didn't see or hear anything at the meeting that contradicted that. He spoke at length about trying to both get more resources (read: cops) for the sector, and about doing the best that he could with what he had. He went into some detail on that.

He brought with him the three of his officers -- two patrolmen, and a sergeant. The sergeant stayed throughout the meeting, but just about the first thing he did was to introduce the patrolmen, and then send them back out on the street in Car 330.

Which was understandable; the entire sector -- again: the largest in the city -- has one car, Car 330, assigned to patrol it. If they need help from outside the Sector, they or the 911 operators have to send for it. A quick glance at the list that was handed out shows that, most of the time, they do -- only a minority of the calls were handled by the car patrolling that sector, including many of the most serious ones.  It's not just that Car 330 is overworked -- it's often called out of the sector, leaving not only that particular neighborhood, but the whole sector without a single squad car in it.

I asked him one question -- the average response time in the sector for Priority 1 (the highest priority) calls. He didn't know.

He did say -- and I believe him -- that getting additional resources is something he's constantly fighting for, and sometimes getting. When, say the CERT Team (Minneapolis' version of SWAT, which includes both cops on direct assignment to it, and others who are CERT-qualified street officers who can be called in for some kinds of emergencies) isn't busy serving high-risk warrants -- they're the folks who kick doors down -- he tries to get them to work the sector, but he is competing, after all, with four other precincts, each of which has up to three sector lieutenants, and each of whom would love to have more squads, more undercover officers, and more help from CERT.

He did make the point -- and it's a good one -- that individual recollection of how long a 911 response takes is often unreliable. I had a moment to speak with him about our own robbery, some years ago, and told him that, although the cops were actually on scene in a matter of single-digit minutes (we got very lucky), I would have sworn that it was hours. I think that's why good numbers, although they don't tell the whole story, are important -- how long, on average, does a 911 Priority 1 call take to get a car on scene in Sector 4, Precinct 4? 

I dunno, either.

The Woman from SAFE

Appearing with Lt. Kelly was CPS (that's Crime Prevention Specialist) Sue Roethele, who is assigned to the sector. She handed out a crime alert -- compiling them is one of the things that she does -- listing the recent rash of burglaries (although it didn't include the robberies) in the neighborhood, and gave a whole list of crime avoidance stuff, all of which I'd heard before.

Which isn't to demean it; it's better to avoid crime in the first place, after all, rather than to get fast response to it, and after looking over her sheet of suggestions, there's not one that I think is a bad idea.  

The Politicians

The politicians were in evidence, too, of course. Wesley Skoglund showed up long enough long enough to be seen, and then left about halfway through the meeting, stopping only long enough to warn me -- "warn" was his word -- not to be so critical of him in this livejournal, or, at least if I was, to avoid mentioning some of the embarrassing things he's said in public that he now denies saying.  (He didn't quite put it that way, of course.  It's possible that it's his memory, rather than his honesty, that's failing him; I dunno.  At least this time, he didn't mention his mythical permit holding window peekers -- or "Skogies," as some have taken to calling them -- which apparently nobody else but Wes can see.) He was obsessed about my repeating ("harping on," is the phrase he used.  It's a fair cop) some of the pretty silly chicken-littling he did during the years-long battle to get the carry bill, and claimed he never said some of the things that not only I, but three other people at the meeting had, in person, heard him say on other occasions.  (Not that we were the only ones; Wesley was awfully loud, for years, about the issue, and some of his best quotes are preserved on the tape of the final Senate floor debate before the MCPPA passed on April 28th, 2003.) 

After raising his voice quite a lot -- he's good at that -- he left with another warning, and a call of "I know you think everybody should just get a gun and start shooting." 

Not too much on this whole accuracy thing, ol' Wesley.

Sandy Colvin Roy was there. I found her pretty persuasive on her self-declared ability to get good followup, if and when somebody found an MPD officer slow, or rude or unprofessional, and she certainly sounded sincere -- up until the point where somebody in the audience asked why they couldn't get more coverage, and she blamed the lack of funding on "the Republicans."

Please. The MPD is funded by Minneapolis city tax dollars, and between the Mayor -- who writes the budget -- and the City Council -- who modifies and approves budgets -- there's a total of thirteen people.  Not one of them's a Republican.  Times are tough, and budgets are difficult, and priorities have to be made -- but I think it would have served her better to admit that, at the moment, one car for the entire sector is the best she's been able to do.  I'm not saying that Republicans would necessarily do better, but whatever the problem of Minneapolis' city government is, it's not the Republicans -- because there aren't any. 

Maybe she'll be able to do better in the future.  Be interesting to see what she says at the next council meeting.

All in all, she came across as smart, dedicated, competent at getting people to do their jobs more politely, and utterly unable (although not at all unwilling to try) to do anything about the huge problem of a single squad car for the whole sector.

The Men from SuperAmerica

Much of the anger during the meeting was addressed at the folks from SuperAmerica, which is right next to the church. There's a definite perception that it's a place where troublemakers come to congregate, particularly those from Bossen Terrace, the Section 8 housing project just north of where 34th crosses over the Crosstown.  (Actually, there's quite a lot more Section 8 housing down in those few blocks, beyond the Bossen complex itself, but it's collectively known as Bossen Terrace.) 

The theory seems to be that SuperAmerica attracts a bad crowd, particularly juveniles out after curfew, and doesn't report them to the cops.  The regional manager didn't really address that -- he seemed more interested in going into the high-tech camera system that they have installed there which, apparently will aid in identification of criminals after they've done something illegal in SuperAmerica.  I guess the theory -- which didn't go over real well -- is that every home and business in the neighborhood should simply get a $50,000 high-tech DVD-recording camera system. 

The audience was unimpressed, and so am I.   Still, I had the definite feeling of wrongly directed anger.  Yes, SuperAmerica should probably be better about cleaning up the garbage that's strewn in the alley behind the store, but the problem in the neighborhood isn't that.   It is an attractive nuisance, sure; when the Bossen Terrace stop-and-rob shuts down at night, folks from the southern part of the sector who want to buy something walk all the way down to this SuperAmerica.  For most, of course, they've got no other intention than buying a soft drink, or a pack of cigarettes, or a snack.  But, I'm sure that some of the Bossen Terrace criminal types (and, again:  these are a minority of the folks there, but given where the arrests have been made, when arrests have been made, there's a lot of them) don't fail to take notice that they can walk up and down those blocks for a whole month and never see so much as a single police car cruising by, although perhaps some of them pause to look at the unoccupied "satellite" police station across from Fluffy's, with its windows dark, as it's used apparently only for some paperwork and for the cops to take bathroom breaks. 

What was Said

Call 911. Lock your doors. Leave the lights on outside.  Be careful, particularly at night. Don't be afraid. Start a block watch. Call your councilman. Vote DFL.  (Those last two, to be fair, were only said by Ms. Roy.  Lt. Kelly and the CPS woman were quite properly nonpartisan.) 

What Wasn't Said

The obvious. I'll get to it in a minute, but:  Honest, pinky swear, I'm not knocking any of the other precautionary measures. We've got a good block organization where I live, but we're lucky -- we do have rental housing, and some of it is, I'm told, low-income, but we don't have a massive unmonitored clump like Bossen Terrace, where there's an ongoing "yard sale" that often (again, so I'm told), features things that you wouldn't expect folks in low-income housing to have to sell with such frequency -- new laptop computers, jewelry, car stereos, etc.

In terms of police coverage, we're lucky enough to be in Sector 2, with more coverage for a sector less than 40% the size of Sector 3, largely because of the problems that are, thankfully, outside my neighborhood, up around Powderhorn Park, and over to the west in Central and to a lesser extent in Bryant.

And just about everybody on my block -- thankfully, in a safer neighborhood -- has a fast trigger finger when it comes to calling 911. 

Carry Permits, Guns, Etc.

While I didn't speak to the meeting (I hadn't been invited to, and didn't particularly want to), I did talk to some folks outside, both during a break and for a few minutes after the meeting.  As I said to some folks who asked me about it, as strong an advocate of carry permits as I am -- and I am -- there's a technical term we in the self-defense trade have for those folks who rely only on a firearm for personal protection, and don't take other precautions (foremost among them alertness, of course, as well as locking door, block clubs, 911 calls):

We call them "idiots." (I actually don't know anybody like that, but the world being a large place, surely there's one or two.)

I've held two classes now in Fluffy's neighborhood, and I'll hold more, probably next month.  It's really a matter of personal choice, and one of the reasons that a "shall issue" permit law works is that permit holders are a self-selected bunch.  They're not only competent and law-abiding, but they've thought through the issues involved, and while they've learned that a handgun and a carry permit aren't a substitute for things like good door locks or personal awareness, they're sometimes a last-ditch option.  Nope; not vigilantes.

More important in practice, I think, in a neighborhood like Fluffy's, is the publicity.  The benefit of shall-issue and similar laws isn't the increased number of dead criminals (it's hard to argue that there are, in fact, more dead criminals as a result, and there's certainly not a lot more -- just fewer dead victims), and as regular readers of this journal know, defensive gun uses aren't only not often a matter of publicity, but even when they happen, some people will argue that they really weren't DGUs at all.

As I've said, both in the book and elsewhere, it's pretty clear that the overall crime-lowering effect of shall-issue laws is criminals responding to information about their own risk. 

The clearest example of how that sort of thing works is Kennesaw, GA.  Back in 1982, the city council there passed an ordinance requiring heads of households to, well, have a gun.  More formally, it required:  In order to provide for the emergency management of the City, and further in order to provide for and protect the safety, security and general welfare of the city and its inhabitants, every head of household residing in the City limits is required to maintain a firearm, together with ammunition therefore.

Truth is, they never issued any citations on the law, and there's an exemption clause.  It was, largely, a publicity stunt.

It worked; look at the effects.  Crime in Kennesaw dropped quickly and dramatically in the year that the ordinance passed (down 27% in the serious, "Part 1" crimes, of which there were 228 in 1981).

It wasn't just a short-term fix either:  sixteen years later, in 1998 -- the most recent data I've got available -- the population of Kennesaw had increased by 275%, but burglaries were still down (in total numbers, not just per capita, although the dropoff was even more dramatic on a per capita basis, given the population increase), and the total "Part 1" crimes hadn't quite reached the same raw numbers that they were at in 1981, despite the almost tripling of the population.  

These days, overall crime in Kennesaw is a bit more half the national average, and a bit less than half Georgia's average; violent crime there is less than a quarter of the state and national averages.

Now, Kennesaw's obviously an outlier -- the word went out there, in 1982, that all of the households would be armed.  From some of the anti-gun mythology, one would expect an increase in burglary, as guns are of obvious value to criminals.

Nope.

It's not exactly carry permit stuff, but it's the same principle:  information went out that Kennesaw was a risky place for criminals to do business, and, largely (although not completely), criminals went elsewhere. 

If -- and I say if -- there were a whole lot of permits issued in Fluffy's neighborhood, and the word went out, what they wouldn't see would be a lot of shootings by permit holders.  I'd be surprised if there was as many as one over the year, even if, say, two hundred permits were issued in that small area. 

It'd be Kennesaw GA, all over again. 

They'd see a few fleeing robbers, of course.  But what there would be would be a lot of publicity about how the folks in the neighborhood aren't going to have to wait until Car 330 or a substitute -- perhaps from miles away -- can arrive on scene.  (I'm not against waiting, mind -- although if you hear somebody breaking into your garage, if the cops don't get there in a few minutes, their chances of catching them approach zero.  And he who steals and runs away, has the same opportunity the next day.  Or something like that.)

But, mostly what they'd see is the criminals who have decided to make those few blocks their private hunting preserve largely go looking elsewhere for easier pickings. 

Permit holders, when there are permit holders around, aren't vigilantes, and very rarely have to take their gun out even as a deterrent to a robbery.  They just make the streets -- and homes -- a little safer for both the permit holders, and for everybody else, and at least some of the criminals move away, at least when "doing business."  Maybe east, into Sector 3 of the 5th precinct, which abuts on Sector 3 of the 4th. 

Maybe to Chicago. 

No, it's not crime prevention; it's crime relocation. 

Not a cheery thought.  Just a practical one.