Crime, Race and Justice Video Program

Panelists

• Tom Johnson, president of the Council on Crime and Justice, which recently issued another in a series of reports on racial disparities
  
• Judge Edward Wilson Ramsey County District Court
  
• Syl Jones, Playwright and journalist
  
• John Choi, St. Paul city attorney
  
• Leonardo Castro, Hennepin County’s chief public defender

The program was hosted by Angela Davis, currently a reporter for WCCO TV. The complete program and a 14-minute selection of highlights are available here as streaming video. The program will air on SPNN in St. Paul throughout December and January. Check SPNN’s web site for the latest airtimes.

Transcript of Show

Human Rights Day 2006 featured highlights from a new one-hour video focussing on racial disparities in our criminal justice system, produced by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights in collaboration with Saint Paul Neighborhood Network (SPNN).

Angela Davis: All right, let's get started. Now first of all for the folks at home who are watching, we need to briefly go through the list -- the major findings of the study by the Council on Crime and Justice. One of the findings deals with African Americans being far more likely to be arrested by police officers for low-level offenses, even though there's no evidence that we are more likely to commit those types of crimes. Can you elaborate on that a bit?

Tom Johnson: Sure, the finding of this particular research study was that African American males are 15 times more likely to be arrested for offenses like loitering, lurking, disorderly conduct, driving after revocation than are whites. It was I think a pretty startling finding, but when we looked at what becomes of those arrests, we found that the conviction rate is very low. For loitering and lurking, for example, it is under 10 percent which means that for every 100 people who are arrested, less than 10 will actually wind up with a conviction, but 90+ will have an arrest record.

Angela Davis: So a lot of arrests, but far fewer convictions if you look at the numbers. Another key finding deals with the effect of school referral practices when it comes to people of color and the effect of extensive police patrols in certain neighborhoods.

Tom Johnson: Well, we found that the schools refer about 25 percent of the caseload into juvenile court, which is a significant percentage and the bulk of those cases are disorderly conduct cases. These are cases that could range from a lunchroom fight to a kid mouthing off to a teacher. It covers a broad spectrum of cases, but it's a substantial portion of the juvenile court caseload. The issue around extensive policing is a broad one, and I'm sure is going to be a topic of quite a bit of the discussion here in terms of just how necessary it is. In many of the neighborhoods where the extensive policing is occurring there are large volumes of calls for police service. There's a lot of pressure on the police and elected officials serving those neighborhoods to have more protection so you have a lot of police in those neighborhoods in response to pressure. It's a more complicated issue than that, but we'll get back to it.

Angela Davis: Another finding addresses the difficulty that offenders have in transitioning back into the community once they're released from prison.

Tom Johnson: This is a huge issue and it should be viewed as a crime prevention or public safety issue in terms of the extent to which we provide assistance in making that transition. We'll come back to this, too, I'm sure, but the two keys in making a successful transition for that person -- the person coming out of prison -- are to find a job and to have some support within the community. If they have a family to come back, that's particularly positive.

Angela Davis: There are also some findings that deal with the role of the family as you were just mentioning in helping the ex-offenders get back in the community and a section that deals with the challenges that children of incarcerated parents face.

Tom Johnson: One of the studies was devoted entirely to looking at the children of incarcerated parents and what was unique about this study was that we actually spoke to the children, which seems to be pretty obvious, but all the previous studies on this topic had talked to the caretakers, or to the adults who had been observing those children. Well, we thought we should hear it from the children's mouth in terms of what the impact is of seeing a parent go off to prison, having a parent in prison and then trying to come back and establish relationships and it's a huge issue. There's not a lot of empirical evidence to support this, but certainly lots of antidotal evidence to suggest that kids are a very significant motivator for a person coming back to prison to stay law abiding.

Angela Davis: Yes. All right, well we've sort of given folks, I think, an idea of what we're going to be talking about. We want to bring in some other voices right now, and we'll start with Mr. Castro. As the chief public defender in Hennepin County, what is your take on African Americans accounting for 72 percent of the low-level arrests even though again there's no evidence that we commit such a high percentage of those crimes? What's going on there?

Leonardo Castro: Well I think for years we've developed social policies and political policies that have accumulated into what we have today. I think not one particular issue really engulfs all of this disparity, but when you think about when you say 25 percent of children in our system are referred from public schools or from schools, we also need to think about that things like "No Child Left Behind" force schools to move kids out of the system, and if they can get a kid out of school and not have to count that child in that system -- that child that may not be doing as well as someone else -- that improves that school's record, okay. That's just one small issue. I think when we talk about the number of arrests, we have policy decisions. Years ago we had something called "Code 4," which meant that we were going to target certain neighborhoods and essentially sweep the neighborhood and pick up who's there and incarcerate them right now. Out of all the felony, narcotic arrests that we make, that are made in Hennepin County, 48 percent of the people that were booked in jail on a felony narcotic arrest in one year do not get charged with that crime.

Angela Davis: So, it's almost as if they're in some ways targeted or just because there's such a high concentration of police in those areas.

Leonardo Castro: You know I'd like to talk about the high concentration of police. I mean the fact of the matter is I agree with everyone that we don't have enough police in Minneapolis. There is no doubt about that in my mind when we talk about what the big cities have done to improve public safety. We clearly need more police, but we also need more police in the neighborhood, living in the neighborhood, working with the community in the neighborhood, establishing some significant trust in those neighborhoods. Those are the things that we need. We do need more police, but we also need better policing techniques.

Angela Davis: And Mr. Jones, as an observer, someone outside of the court system, what is your take on this?

Syl Jones: Well, first of all I think it's phenomenal the work that Tom and his organization has done -- what is it? -- 17 studies that were done over a period of what, five years?

Tom Johnson: Five years.

Syl Jones: It's amazing, but we do have a problem in the very fact of us needing to do these studies and this is something that I've said before, which is that there's been many people on the streets who have said, we have a problem here when it comes to disparities around criminal justice. The sense that is given to some people in the community is that we don't really have a problem until the white power structure says it's a problem. Now that's a issue for us because if we're going to change this, we've got to have people on our side; we've got to have people working together and they need to feel as if they're part of the solution and not just part of the problem. I think that's my first reaction, that people have known for many years that this was a problem. I think what we need to do first of all is we need to bring the community into this discussion, make sure that they understand that they are being heard and have been heard and in a sense really sort of affirmed what some of their impressions have been over the years because those people will then be people who will work with us to make these changes and they won't be feeling as if they somehow have been ignored in this process.

Angela Davis: Judge Wilson from where you sit in the courtroom, what is your take on this high percentage of arrests when it comes to whether or not there's really any evidence that African Americans commit more of these low-level crimes?

Judge Edward Wilson: Well, I have a couple thoughts on that. As a judge I see things on the backend and so I kind of fear, I kind of anecdotally have things come into me, how things come before the court, but I also read the newspaper and I watch television as well. There's a couple of things that I'm thinking that are largely responsible. You have people arrested when there's a concentration of police in a particular area looking for people to be arrested. Now, I don't mean that to be, to sound simplistic as it comes off because it is not simplistic at all. What happens as Tom just said a few minutes ago is that there's a reason why there's such a police concentration in certain areas. The reason is that many of the people in poor communities are complaining and angry and upset. We recently had things happening in North Minneapolis where I can see there was controversy from both sides as to whether or not what kinds of police response there should be to a recent murder. But the point is that there was a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, and there has been for a number of years from people in the community about what we can do to stop crime, but people want it to be done in a particular way. They don't want police obviously to come in like gangbusters. They want it to be done in a proper manner. That's a roundabout way of saying what I see occurring is that people in the community are angry about crime, but at the same time they feel that they don't want their community to be overrun, they don't want their community to be treated unfairly by the justice system.

Angela Davis: Mr. Choi, a Saint Paul City attorney, what is your feeling about this high number of arrests?

John Choi: I guess as a prosecuting office, we're kind of in the middle and I guess the traditional paradigm for the prosecution office is that you're sitting at your desk and a pile of cases come and you essentially handle them. One of the things that I think that needs to happen is our prosecutors need to get that connection to the police department and also to the community. We have this process, or program, in our office called the community prosecution program. When are prosecutors go out into the community and interact with the communities that are complaining, a lot of times the communities that are complaining are communities of color and they're complaining about they've got a crime problem in their neighborhood. A lot of times these communities are lower income, in terms of our community prosecutors going out there and a lot of times we find that sometimes because we're developing this relationship with the community, we find that sometimes depending on what the perspectives are there is a little racism in terms of if there's white neighbors who are complaining about an African American family and they're saying that they're committing some crimes, but that's not necessarily true. I think from a prosecution standpoint it's a very complicated question, but I think that the more cultural interaction, or interaction that we do with the community, the better off we'll be.

Angela Davis: Moving onto another topic that is addressed pretty prominently in the report and it deals with a person's criminal record and how that criminal record can create a long- lasting barrier when it comes to employment and housing and consequently even leading to that person committing new crimes. And I know from reading the report one of the recommendations, one of the action steps as they're called that goes with the recommendations, talks about enacting legislation that prohibits public access to criminal records of low-level offenses that have been resolved in favor of the offender. Now apparently there are studies that show I guess that when employers are sometimes denied access, when they can't get criminal backgrounds on people, then they go on assumptions and hunches and stereotypes so is that necessarily a good thing, trying to prohibit access to criminal backgrounds?

Tom Johnson: Well we think it is since we've proposed the legislation. This is a multi-faceted issue, but we're sort of from the school first-things-first and when persons that are presenting themselves for employment or for housing or for credit are trying to get a loan to go to college or technical school or whatever if that is denied by a piece of paper there is just something inherently that shows that they were arrested, or arrested, prosecuted, dismissed or maybe a conviction for loitering that it is one thing for the criminal justice system to say, you're guilty, here are the consequences, But we are shooting ourselves in the foot as a society, as a community if we're going to say all right because you did that, you're not going to have a job, you're not going to get credit, you're not going be able to go to school, you're not going to have decent housing. It doesn't take a rocket scientist -- and I'm not one -- to figure out that you're going to have consequences from denying jobs and denying housing. And those consequences are more crime. This needs to be viewed as crime prevention or a public safety issue. I'm a former prosecutor; if people do bad things, there should be consequences for that, clearly. But yet we've got to move on and say all right, once those consequences have been dealt and incurred by the person, than let them move on. It's not only the right thing to do, it is the safe thing to do from a community perspective.

Angela Davis: But if I'm an employer or a landlord shouldn't I know if someone has like six arrests? First define what are low-level offenses? What are we talking about when we say low-level offenses? You mentioned loitering.

Tom Johnson: These are all nonviolent felonies; they're nonviolent offenses that we're talking about. You are talking about all the driving; the arrests that might come out of traffic offenses, the offenses typically get referred to as "the livability offenses." We're talking about those kinds of offenses around which there's a very aggressive arrest policy on the part of most police departments. If you're going to say as we have as a society, "Look, we want our police being out there making those arrests," not having to think about the consequences, they're just there to protect the community and if the community sees this as a problem, we're going to arrest the person. If there are five people on the street, we'll arrest them all and square it away downtown. Well if you're going to have that policy and I think we can argue about whether that is a good policy, but if you're going to have it and we have, then you've got to find someway, some relief valve at the end of that. In our mind, the relief valve is converting this otherwise public data back to private data. It's available still to the police, it would be available to the judge, it's available within the criminal justice system, but it isn't available when that person is out looking for a job.

Syl Jones: Well you know, Tom, it's interesting because to me we need to make sure we're talking in the context of this whole thing about disparities because if there are disparities, racial disparities, in terms of arrests, then there are obviously disparate consequences, too, that effect these groups that we're talking about. I agree that the policy would be great, but we just need to understand the meaning of these sorts of disparities when it comes to people's lives. It does impact them tremendously to have people looking at an arrest record that may not be correct in the first place. They may have been arrested for something they didn't do, they may have been misidentified. Your studies have said that that occurs quite a bit so that's why I think it's really important that we limit the availability of that information upfront and that people have an opportunity to go through the process of applying for a job and of being accepted based on who they are or what they know before you get a chance to look at that arrest record.

Leonardo Castro: And let's make a distinction between arrest and convictions, to the point that if we have this disparity that so many people are getting arrested and so many are not getting convicted then we create what Syl talks about, the disparities on collateral issues. That's why the answer to your question is no -- the landlord shouldn't know about those arrests, those shouldn't be public records, those should be records for perhaps the police should have and law enforcement should have because that helps them make some decisions, but does it really allow the landlord to make a decision? Let's remember that until that person is convicted these people are innocent and we forget that when on the war on crimes and the war on this and all the other terminologies that we give to this, but if you have these types of disparities, if 90 out of 100 people who get picked up don't get convicted, or plead guilty to something, then we have a real problem when we're giving that information out to everybody. To your point about an employer who can't get information, that's a pretty sad employer because information is so readily available out there today. Seventeen-year-olds can't get jobs at McDonald's because they got some theft conviction, that's what's happening to jobs, kids who can't get school loans because somebody in their family has some conviction for a felony.

Angela Davis: That's happening?

Leonardo Castro: That happens. These are federal policies. These are state policies that are preventing people from moving forward.

Angela Davis: So we're maybe at a point where there's access to too much information and not enough context.

Tom Johnson: And there's no villain here in the sense that this information has been public and so you've got people sort of stuck in that mindset. It should continue to be public, but as a practical matter when that information was on a piece of paper tucked away in a police department file or the clerk of court's office, there was really no way to access it the way there is now, when it's in the computer database and information can be swept. Twenty years ago we might have done a background check for the chief financial officer or the CEO but it was very rare to have background checks. Now it's almost universal including for entry-level positions and that's just the way the law has developed and society attitudes have developed. We're much less risk tolerant now so we want to know all of this information and it's all available and the companies come and you can get a background check on any one of us for 25 bucks. It's done, but we haven't thought about the policy. Is it a good policy to be labeling people a criminal when it may just be an arrest or it may have been solved, prosecution in their favor or even at some point even if it's a conviction for one of these lower-level offenses? Don't we have to say let that go behind them, put it behind them, let them move on?

Angela Davis: Judge Wilson, what do you think?

Judge Edward Wilson: We were talking about this a little bit earlier and I've got mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I agree with the idea that until a person's been convicted of an offense, they are not guilty of anything by definition. On the other hand, I wonder how far this kind of thinking takes us. I think this is very positive thinking in a way, but on the other hand, let's say that a person has five arrests for theft from various stores. Is that something that an employer ought not to know? I mean is that a coincidence?

Leonardo Castro: It shows a pattern of being arrested because of the disproportionate policies... I agree that there's a distinction there and that information is available and perhaps it shouldn't be available to employers, but when we have these types of disparities, we have to make those distinctions.

John Choi: I think the big issue is where do you draw the line, basically? You have a livability offense; let's say it's loitering, okay. Well, from a prosecution standpoint that's kind of a tough one to prove, but they get charged once in a while, but if that's the only conviction out there maybe that one should not be available to an employer because that is kind of a lower-level offense. But there are probably facts and circumstances surrounding that incident and maybe you have to deal with them on a case-by-case basis. There are a lot of things sitting here that we can't figure out exactly when to handle a certain person's situation is.

Angela Davis: Any maybe they're loitering because they don't have a job. That's a cause and effect.

Leonardo Castro: I want to expand this term, "victim." When we talk about victim, we tend to just talk about the person who a crime was committed against. These communities are victims of these policies. These families are victims of these policies, when you can't get housing and you can't get a job, we have to expand our idea and our interpretation of what a victim is.

Tom Johnson: Yes, John, we'll acknowledge there's complexities that have been glossing over here to make a point and it is about striking a balance, but right now the balance isn't properly struck and I believe that very strongly and it's not as though there's anyone at fault it's just that developments have occurred in a way that have brought us to where we are at and we haven't come back and thought about is this right? Is it right in an ethical, moral way and is it right from a societal standpoint in terms of is it good for public safety, crime prevention. I can answer those very strongly--no, it's not.

John Choi: We've been talking about racial disparities, the great work that you've done, you've brought this to light and we're talking about it today, but actually we've known this for a really long time and the key issue is what are we going to do? I think doing something but we have to think all of these things through because it is such a complicated issue to say exactly why all of this is occurring. There are so many various factors, economic; there might be some issues with police training, maybe there's some issues with prosecution training, maybe there's other family issues, just a whole wide variety of things.

Tom Johnson: Let me just come back to what Syl said earlier--that the solutions have to come from the community here, and when I say that I'm talking about as a white, the communities of color. I was part of the system for 16 years and we came up with a lot of solutions and there were solutions that worked well for us. People within the system and coming at the problems with a background of whiteness and that doesn't work now. The interrelationships are so different between the system and the community where the interrelations, interactions are occurring that these cannot be solutions that I'm thinking of or that people within the system are coming up with; we have to reach out to the community, because the solutions have to work there or they're not solutions.

Syl Jones: I think it's worth also broadening this discussion just a little bit to point out that racial disparities are rampant throughout all of society. It is very interesting that we're talking about this now in the context of criminal justice, but in education and many other places. At what point do we start to look at this as a systemic issue, an issue that effects our entire system, and is there a systemic answer to the question of why are these things occurring. I think a lot of time we don't want to blame people, we don't want to say this person or this organization is racist. But I think we have a racist history in our country, and I think that's one of the things that's being reflected in these disparities and we need to come to terms with that and say, that is our history and now we have to change based on now what we've done is we've come up with evidence of these disparities, the wastefulness of them, the hurtfulness of them, the fact that they are shooting us in the foot as you said before, but there are systemic issues that we need to come to grips with here, not just in the area of criminal justice, but throughout our entire society.

Angela Davis: Let's look at one of the facts and I mentioned this in the introduction, the fact that Minnesota's black-white prison ratio is the twelfth highest in the nation and that are overall racial disparity is more than twice the national average. What's the explanation for that?

Tom Johnson: Well actually being twelfth is an improvement. We were number one.

Angela Davis: We were number one? How many years ago?

Tom Johnson: About 1999 I think was the last year that we were number one...

Syl Jones: And you never saw anybody holding up any of those plastic fingers, saying "we're number one" in racial disparities, but it's true we were.

Tom Johnson: What's happened in the meantime is the meth epidemic and there's been more whites that have been sent to prison as a result of it primarily from outstate Minnesota. So it's not as though there are fewer persons of color that are being sent to prison. There's actually more, it's just that there's a larger percentage of whites being sent.

Leonardo Castro: When you think about that we know that all these lock 'em up policies that we've had for the last 15 years and we continue to have, those folks are going to get out one day. What are we going to do when they get back into the communities about jobs, about housing? The federal government is starting to spend a whole ton of money, giving a whole ton of money, worrying about reentry programs because they recognize that if you do not deal with folks coming back into the community, there's a likelihood they will turn back to what they know.

Angela Davis: Because there's the immediate need of housing and employment and things, being able to take care of their families.

Leonardo Castro: Absolutely and when you have employers who of course aren't willing to give people jobs because they have criminal history, that just compounds the problem.

Angela Davis: We were talking about solutions and I need to mention another recommendation. We talked about the families particularly enhancing public safety by helping children of incarcerated parents, their caretakers and the offender establish a network of social support. How do we go about doing that, and what's happening to the children of incarcerated parents?

Tom Johnson: They go on living without anyone paying much attention to them until they show up in the justice system, and then people say, well that's not a surprise. Their parent, or parents were in jail, cousin was in jail, and so the point is we don't pay any attention. Our specific proposal is that when someone is being sentenced, judged, and is a parent and would be sent to prison that either concurrently with that sentencing or soon thereafter as possible, you would do a family needs assessment where we would actually look to see is reconciliation or reunification with the family something that's desirable once the person gets out of prison. Not all cases it is but the parent who is in prison might be thinking that's going to happen and it's just a disaster waiting to happen when they get out so you need to address that. If it is something that should happen and in most cases it will be, then how are you going to prepare for that? How's visitation going to occur? What are the steps that have to be taken so that when that person does come out that that family is there supportive and that they are aware of the changes that have happened to the kid. If the kid that was six is now 13 and it's not quite the same in terms of how you have to deal with the kid. Those things need to be done, but we also want in particular to look at the educational status of kids who are left behind because if you combine those kids dropping out of school with the fact that they're a child of incarcerated parents, it's almost guaranteed that they're going to be in the justice system. To ignore that, or to pretend like that isn't going to happen and then wait until they come into the justice system before you start doing something, just doesn't make sense. The least thing we can do is to focus in on their education and make sure that we're providing them some support if there's attendance problems, if there's behavioral problems, achievement problems; what can we do to help correct those problems and support those kids getting an education?

Angela Davis: And Judge, is that what you see in your courtroom, you see young people coming through who have family members, parents?

Judge Edward Wilson: Unfortunately that's the cycle that we always see and when you see certain people coming through are often, unfortunately bringing their children to court, which is awfully sad sometimes, you can unfortunately project ahead what's going to happen. It's interesting what you said a moment ago about working with families to see if there can be family unification. When I was once working with an organization that worked with young men in Totem Town, which is a juvenile facility in Ramsey County, and 14- 15-year-olds, and we would do mock trials for them. One of the things that would happen is I would talk with them afterwards and I'd ask them, "what do you miss?" It's amazing to me how many of these young men who were 14- 15-years-old said they missed their children.

Syl Jones: Their children?

Judge Edward Wilson: Their children, 14- 15- 16-years-old, missed their children, but that said something to me also that had a certain positive effect with a certain positive spark and that is that at least at that time, and they were still young, they still cared about their children; that meant something to them being in a family. Now having said that, I think all these issues are very complex; there are some people unfortunately who go to prison who ought not to be reunited with their families. There's a reason and so I think we have to look at it very carefully, but I think the plan itself is a very good plan in terms of trying to take these steps to see what kind of assessments can be done.

The only other thing that I would say is that one of the things we haven't touched upon is the issue of restorative justice. I think that restorative justice which involves getting people together, trying to get communities together to work with offenders to try to repair the damage that's been caused by the community, is a holistic way of looking at criminal offenses. I agree that that our criminal justice in many ways can be called a failure in many ways, and I think that we ought to involve communities much more and restorative justice is the key way of doing that, in which you actually get people from the community working with people in the criminal justice system and working with offenders, coming together in a group and talking about these issues in some detail. That brings about trust and communication between the community and the criminal justice system and it also gives some ownership to the community about these offenses.

Syl Jones: Judge, isn't it really countercultural though where you're suggesting that we do, I mean we have such a division between criminals and communities and we've had this reinforced separation. The idea of restorative justice which makes perfect sense, I mean if you work for the UN and Kosovo, I'm sure you had some experience with that. That's sort of countercultural in our society, don't you think?

Judge Edward Wilson: To a large degree it is... in Ramsey County we have had a restorative justice program that worked entirely with young African American men who would have otherwise gone to prison. Most of them we're involved in drug sales in the community. I'm happy to say we had some support from our Ramsey County attorney; we had some disagreements with our Ramsey County attorney on certain issues as well, but largely, she, Susan Gaertner, was quite supportive I'm glad to say. In any case the community members were excited to be involved in this. It's not for everyone. There's lots of community members who don't want it, but there is a great number of people in the community who want to come forward and work with young men who have these problems.

Tom Johnson: Angela, can I just interject a little anecdote here because I think it illustrates in my mind anyway the difference in the way the system responds to crime within a white community and within a community where there are largely people of color. I live by the University of Minnesota. We've had a problem over the years with students having keggers on the weekend, noisy parties, and there's a little bit of a problem. About three years ago the police decided they were going to crack down on noisy parties so they started going out and making arrests for disorderly conduct and for minors drinking and for serving liquor to minors, etc. Shortly thereafter it became a real brew ha ha when these students started figuring out that it was getting in their way, having insurance ramifications, that the University was paying attention. Now these were no surprise largely white kids so what happens is people get together, talk it through, and we've got a restorative justice program now that solves the problem rather then getting arrested or cited, or just sent to a little panel of neighbors, they have to apologize and they get sent out to do some clean up in the neighborhood, everyone's happy, it works. The parties have not totally disappeared, but they're much less than noticeable than they use to be, but no one has a criminal record, no one has anything on their record. Now, there's some serious stuff going on in North Minneapolis and there's limits on what you can do around restorative justice and there is a program that recently began up there, but it is so much, much lower level intensity than it need be to work on a lot of these quality of life, livability offenses.

Leonardo Castro: That's a huge reason why we need more people covering the legislature because until it impacts what you know and who you know, you don't do much about it, okay, and the people in power until it impacts them, they will not do anything about it. Why do you think that you don't get a mark on your record if you're driving only 10 miles over the speed limit on a 55? Because there's a lot of white people in power who would show up with speeding tickets. To your point in regards to children of people who have been sent to prison, I think that's a great idea. I think it would be an even better idea if you didn't involve the court system. If you involved their community and the services around, community based and not the court, because again I'll come to this and I'll continue to say this for as long as I live, all these issues, all these ills that plague our society somehow so many people think that the courts have the resources to cure addiction, to cure mental illness, to solve homelessness. The court is not equipped nor has the skill or the resources to do that and it has to happen in areas like the example you just gave where they removed it out of the court system and they created a restorative justice, if that's what works, that's outside of the judicial process and works for that particular community.

Tom Johnson: Right and the broader point here is that around these lower offenses what you really have to have is a problem-orientated strategy and recognize that the police have a very limited capacity to solve mental illness or chemical dependency or homelessness. There will be an occasion when it's a public safety issue and an arrest will have to occur, but that arrest is not going to solve the problem. The person isn't going to be any less homeless when they get out of jail and it's a matter then of bringing resources from the county and from other agencies within the community to figure out, all right, what is the issue here and how do we best solve it? In some cases it will be the police, but in other cases it won't. But right now -- and this is to get the police off the hook -- we're putting all of the responsibility on them to solve these problems and they have two responses really -- a lump arrest-and-site is one response and the other is move on; and they've a neighborhood saying, "get them out of here." Well, they do; it's only for a few hours in some cases, but that's what they do.

Syl Jones: Tell me how though as a member of a community where I have some questions about how to handle crime that's occurring, how do I feel empowered to set up something that would get these things out of the courts and would allow me as a community member and my neighbors to actually impact what's going on in the community. I think a lot of people feel as if they have been disempowered, like they don't have the ability to even speak to their neighbors much less to get behaviors that would change so I think what we're talking about again is a new paradigm. It's good that we're talking about it, but it is very counter-cultural. We have to set up a sense where people feel like they are empowered to do this and the government and other people have to say you are empowered, and by the way, here are some resources to help you do it.

Judge Edward Wilson: Going back to the restorative justice thing again, I think it's crucial that this be community driven to a certain degree, but it cannot be without a partnership with the courts. I don't know how it works without a partnership with the courts if you're working in the criminal justice system. By law the courts are going to have to be involved but that's going to take people in the court system and there are people in the court system who are willing to take a lead role and do these kinds of things. Again, there are a lot of people who do not want to do these things in a court system, but there always are some and it involves some risk taking on their parts and it involves trying to reach out to the community to do these things. Yes, it's hard to get these people together, community members and court system together because there is this inherent distrust between the community and the courts.

Angela Davis: Mr. Choi, I'm curious: You've been Saint Paul City Attorney for less than a year. What are some of your initial observations on how the process works and some of the things that you're seeing that disturb you and things that you'd like to see done in a better way?

John Choi: One thing that I'm finding, one of the things that I really have enjoyed learning about and starting to kind of work on in our office is our community prosecution program and exactly kind of what you're talking about, Judge. when we're out there engaging the community, I think that we're doing a better job when we're listening, not just to people who are complaining about these nuisance activities, but also people who are concerned about certain enforcement actions that are happening in their community or all aspects of what the community might be expecting of our police and our prosecutors. When we do that, the traditional model for prosecutors is that you kind of sit in your office and you sit there kind of insolated and you just wait for the police to bring you the cases and your role is maybe to be somewhat of a check on the system because ultimately you've have that standard of whether or not, what is the likelihood of success at trial and ultimately you have to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

But what I'm trying to do in our office is try to encourage our attorneys to get out there more into the community, interact with the police, interact with community leaders; you have to wade through some of the issues because when you have people complaining there is some racial bias in what, some people when they're complaining, but if you can wade through that and also seek other opinions out, I think we become better prosecutors. And I think that, not to suggest that all judges should do this, but I think that the court system if they kind of did more of that. I just went on a ride along with a police officer over the past weekend and I learned a lot about what the police go through and it gives me a little more understanding of some of the things that they're dealing with, but also, too, I saw the disparity firsthand. The people that the police were dealing with were very much people of color, and you have to think to yourself what is going on, and why is this the case?

Angela Davis: Looking at the recommendations because the report does more than just outline problems, you have recommendations and action steps. One of the first recommendations, and I need you to break it down for me in a different language, reading directly from the report it says, "enhance public safety by utilizing location-specific, multi-prong strategies to address low-level offenses thereby reducing the ineffective over reliance on the justice system." What does that mean?

Tom Johnson: It's just what we've been talking about. Location specific is it may be the so called hot spots that the police use their computers to identify through computer mapping, so it's an intersection in a particular neighborhood where they're getting a lot of calls around that neighborhood. A typical response now is to send out the squads, increase your presence, stop cars that are passing through that intersection, show that you've responded. It's not around what's driving those calls. There may be a bunch of kids standing on the block but there's a dysfunctional family in the middle of the block that is spilling those kids out onto the block and you really need to identify that and you can only do that if you're paying attention to what people within the neighborhood are saying and that you don't have just this one response. That isn't to say that again that on occasion and that the police will have to be there immediately to make arrests. This is not about endangering public safety, but it's looking at what is underlying the problem and taking the best strategy to solve that problem. In some cases it will be intervention of the court. That's the only thing you can do and you need an arrest and a prosecutor to bring charges to get there, but in other cases, it won't. We do that; we find ways to do that within white communities much more easily, much more readily, much more extensively, but we don't have the relationships, the trust, and the culture to do that within communities of color.

Angela Davis: And dialogue is a problem, right? Just being able to call and talk. I mean would I call and talk to someone in the city attorney's office? I don't know that I would feel confident enough to do that if I had a problem.

Syl Jones: Aren't we really talking about in white communities what happens is they've been able to decriminalize certain kinds of activities that are nuisance activities? They just take them out of the criminal justice system. They said these are not good things and we don't want them to be perpetuated, but they don't rise to the level of crime so we don't go into the criminal justice system. Isn't that part of what we're talking about?

Tom Johnson: That's what we try to do, yes.

Syl Jones: I think that would work in a lot of places because we're burdening the system in ways that are just overwhelming, as you know firsthand, all of you do, and this goes all the way to the disparity imprisonment rate. I should have pointed this out earlier that when Minnesota was number one in the disparity between black and white imprisonment rates, when the ratio was 23 to 1, that is blacks were imprisoned at a rate 23 times higher than whites.

Angela Davis: And we had 23 blacks?

Tom Johnson: No. But we're talking rates, but that was a very significant number, but it was important to know that we didn't get there by imprisoning more blacks, if there were blacks at a higher rate than every other state, we're about in the middle of all the states. What we had found was ways to keep whites out of prison and we had the lowest imprisonment rate by far for whites. That's sort of the way because Minnesota has been a very homogenous state for a long time and we've been able to come up with solutions and progressive around this prison thing. It's expensive, we can't quite figure out how it works, you know if someone does something real serious we're going to use it, but we weren't using it for the drug cases. Minnesota had a long history of drug cases; prison wasn't for drug problems; it just wasn't. Then it becomes largely a black problem as it's perceived, legislators and others, and all of a sudden prison is just fine for drug offenses. That accounted for a huge jump in the imprisonment rates for persons of color particularly African Americans. It's trying to get out of this problem. We know how to solve problems effectively around crime when it is crime that is committed by whites. We can figure out how we can respond to that when it's the lower level. When it's homicide, sexual assault, armed robbery, the response in that was part of our finding. Yes, there's some disparity, but the disparity there is not nearly what it is when you look at this point of contact. The chances if you're a person of color of having a police officer approach you is so much higher than if you're a white person; that's where we found that this real disparity exists.

Leonardo Castro: I want to give you a concrete example. Meth labs are predominantly a rural Minnesota, rural America, white problem. We figured out how to almost eliminate meth labs in this state. It only took us a year to do it once we figured out what the problem was and we hid it and now we don't have any meth labs blowing up. Now meth is still being used extensively in rural Minnesota and there's probably more meth coming into this state than there ever was before, but the labs that were blown up out in the rural communities are for the most part gone because, in my mind, we knew, or the folks that make these decisions, knew who it was impacting and figured out a way to deal with it.

Tom Johnson: Knew how to get the information to get to the problem and we took care of that aspect of the problem.

Syl Jones: But are you also saying that there's an underlying racism or it's more than simply that you knew how to deal with those people, but there's something else at work here, something else going on here in terms of why the attention is being paid, for example, is it just coincidence that these meth labs which were mostly white that those were the ones we were able to look and solve?

Leonardo Castro: I don't think it's a coincidence, but I think that we solve the problems that we know how to solve and we focus on those problems that impact us, okay. When I say us, I mean the people in power, with the people they can identify with, we focus on being able to solve those problems and when we don't have a significant amount of people of color in power positions there isn't that understanding; there isn't that relationship for those folks in power to solve it.

Tom Johnson: I see what you mean; yes that makes sense. Let me just add this and this is maybe too controversial to be adding this late in the program, but the perspective of the white here at the table, there needs to be two conversations going in within our community: one is the one that we've been having which is this bias within the system and it works almost ....included invariably to the disadvantage of persons of color. You do not want to be a person of color when it comes to being in contact with the criminal justice system or starting with the fact you're more likely to be in contact, but even after that. So that's one conversation that has to occur and we have to get on top of that one and there is some, what we hope, are some discrete things that we can do in the short term to have some significant effect. But the other conversation that has to be community-wide also is that within the African American community there is a problem of violence and we've got to be able to have that conversation, too. The homicide rate, we've have a disparity and who's imprisoned for homicide? But disparity based on whose committing homicide? We also know that the victims are disproportionate African Americans but we've got to have that conversation, too... I think part of the reason that whites have a hard talking about what's happening at this lower-level stuff and the other biases even around who's detained in jail pending trial, all those little disparities that all add up and work against the person of color, is that we're angry, fearful about having this discussion around the violence issue. That's out there, too, and both of those conversations have to occur.

Angela Davis: Not to cut you off, but for people who want to be able read the report and all of its language and all of its details, where can we get a copy of it? Is that available to the public?

Tom Johnson: It is. They can get it online and it's simple. The web site address is: www.racialdisparities.org. All of the reports that we've been talking about are posted there.

Angela Davis: The next step I know is you're working on legislators, trying to get them involved in making some new laws?

Tom Johnson: Yes, but also we're out in the community trying to drum up as much support and participation as possible around all the action steps included in the legislation.

Syl Jones: Because I work in the arts and understand the impact that the arts have on people, I think it would be great to take this conversation and dramatize it and put it in front of a lot of people who could really see then how these things impact, not just individuals, but all of society. We need to broaden out and use visual arts, use the media and other things, to get the message out about this.

Angela Davis: We've got the conversation started here on SPNN, and I want to thank our panel. We're out of time. Thank Mr. Johnson, again Leonardo Castro, the chief public defender for Hennepin County; John Choi, city attorney, City of Saint Paul; Judge Edward Wilson, thank you so much for being here; and Syl Jones, we will look for your work, look for your play; and Tom Johnson for all of your work with the Council on Crime and Justice; and want to thank all of you who watched us today and hopefully we get the conversation started, we'll get some action going as well in the community because there is something we can do, we can get something started. On behalf of Saint Paul Neighborhood Network and the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, we want to thank you for watching and hope you enjoyed today's program.