In your neighborhood, have you ever kept a can on your front porch to deposit the needles found on the street? Have you ever had a conversation with a neighbor on best practices on how to keep drug dealers from congregating in front of your house? A sprinkler going in the summer that reaches out onto the sidewalk works. When you leave town do you worry your house or garage will be invaded? If you park on the street, are you nervous every time you approach your car because you may, (as you have in the past), find the passenger side window busted and your glove compartment rifled through? If you have lived near an encampment, have you at times had to shovel up human waste in your driveway or had your garbage containers tagged by the city for inappropriate waste for which you were not responsible? Have you ever been told over the phone by a service person, they don’t send their installers to your area? Have you ever been menaced by a drug dealer? Have you witnessed the horrors of addiction on the street (users walking by bent over, yelling at no one, stripping and scratching their skin, sitting on the sidewalk nodding etc.)? Do you personally know a neighbor who has been viciously attacked with a knife, hard object, or firearm that resulted in a long hospital stay or death? Were you a victim of such an attack yourself? Most Minneapolitans living in high crime neighborhoods could answer yes to all those hassles not reported in the daily news and some could tell you about the more violent ones that do grab the headlines. But no matter the level, headline-grabbing homicides that will traumatize a neighbor for life or a stressful, fearful incident; they are everyday occurrences. Sometimes they are downright hardships. How is a low-wage worker who lives paycheck to paycheck going to come up with the five hundred dollars needed to fix his busted car window?
The documentary, Precarious State, raises the issue of crime being a problem in Minneapolis. A lot of people have pushed back, saying that crime is not a problem, most recently Eric Roper from the Star Tribune. In his piece, he talks about his experience living in Minneapolis. He talks about the “lush urbanity” of Minneapolis. He supplements this with pictures of sunflowers and people lounging along the riverbank and talking about loving riding his bike in the protected bike lane on a beautiful warm day. While this may be Roper’s experience, it is not mine, nor the experience of people in much of the City. I wish I was among the majority living in this city who never knew anyone who was murdered, but I personally know four. Crime in my part of the city is far less than six degrees of separation from my neighbors.
I have reached out to neighbors, who have been victims of violent crimes, for this article, but some will not share their stories for fear of retaliation. Some live in fear, as the violent perpetrators, after being apprehended are often let back out onto the streets from which they have committed their crime.
Because of a change in city strategy on how best to handle encampments very few have formed since last winter. However, in high crime neighborhoods, there are still pockets of users and dealers where the two groups congregate, function exactly like encampments because encampments are places where people buy drugs. Therefore, I will also refer to them as encampments.
The encampments exist because of two groups, dealers and enablers. Dealers make money from the encampments. If neighbors become active in working toward getting people off the street and into treatment and supportive housing, they are threatened by both sides. The dealers don’t want to see the camps moved off the street because it’s a real hassle for them to go looking for their clients. They could even lose clients if they take the suggestions of their outreach workers to get off the street and into treatment. The whole time a neighborhood organizes to move a destructive camp off their block they are menaced by the dealers. A few years ago, while working toward that end, as an encampment on my corner was growing and becoming more dangerous, I was entering my house when a dealer called out to me from a distance and said, “I know where you live.” To me it was a stressor, but for several neighborhood residents the threats became real. Homes were invaded, trashed and burglarized, cars were shot up, garages and houses were burned down by dealers who want to keep the money flowing. Not only is it frightening, but it’s also a huge expense to deal with the harassment of dealers, especially for those who are just getting by.
Like the dealers, the enablers want to keep people in encampments. Enablers are the activists and organizations that cater to the needs of people in encampments. In speaking with some of them, I got the impression that they felt obligated to take care of the homeless users in these camps. It gave them a sense of purpose and a way to assuage their White privilege guilt. Despite their good intentions, their actions only bring violent crime into poor neighborhoods, as camps become party centrals, for dealers, human traffickers and users, (half of whom are housed). Their enabling also increases the problem, as more unhoused users move into the city and into our neighborhoods for easy connections to dealers and an easier way to stay addicted.
Enablers probably won’t burn your house down, but if you register your displeasure loudly enough and ignore their suggestions of not calling the police when dealers are taking over your street or traffickers are using the yurts for their abused women and girls to turn tricks, they will dox you. They will attack you online and trash you there. The gang bangers aren’t the only ones who know where you live. The enablers will hang nasty stuff on your fence, and cyber-bully you by putting out all kinds of false information about you on social media. And that can do as much harm as the real-world attacks.
The top organizers of this caregiving/enabling movement, sometimes known as “harm reduction,” see that there is money to be made off encampments just like drug dealers. While encampments were dotting the high crime neighborhoods, they had websites and GoFundMe pages that took in tens of thousands of dollars a year. You could buy a lot of firewood and yurts for that kind of money. And many are not registered charities, so you don’t really know where the money has gone.
These gatherings of dealers and users sometime congregate in front of non-profit organizations, charities, and small businesses. The manager of one of these charities told me of an open-air drug market that camped right in front of his establishment one summer. The low-income, working class, immigrant families who rely on his organization were afraid to come in and receive the help they needed because they had to wade through that unsavory crowd. So allowing this encampment hurt other families in need.
His charity is also available for those right out of prison, treatment or a half-way house. He feared for this group when they too had to wade through dealers and users in front of his establishment, as it can be extremely tempting for them to break the law or fall back into using again. When it’s scary for some and tempting for others, it is hard for a non-profit to be of service. Think of how hard it is for a small family-owned-business to make a profit.
Though Black and Brown people are front and center in the argument for abolishing the police, BIPOC neighborhoods have suffered the most in the push to defund the MPD. With the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020 the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates along with other candidates running for City Council that year promised to defund the police. After the riots the fall out of hundreds of police officers exiting the force did not go unnoticed, as drug cartels from every corner descended upon our city. Occupation and control of our streets by the narcotics industry is real here. Our police force went from 950 cops to 550 cops and we are now living with what it means to defund the police. So are the drug dealers, who make millions off our city.
After countless years of a racist police culture and senseless killings of unarmed Black and Brown people that came to a head with the murder of George Floyd, the department is now going in the right direction. A Black man shared with me some time ago, that even after George Floyd, he witnesses the occasional disrespect of an officer toward a person of color, and he is still nervous about getting out of his car around police. With that said, he and the community see the progress the police are making, even in their occasional failures. There is no one who does not want to see the goals of a consent decree met. But, community members are concerned that the MPD, after five years, are still the most depleted police department of any major city in the nation. Because of this depletion, they do not feel protected and often experience long waits for the police to show up after calling 911. Not having police makes them feel unsafe.
Even the failure of responding to a low-level crime can prove to have serious consequences. A resident living in a high crime neighborhood in the 3rd Precinct consistently reported a few individuals setting off fireworks on a weekly basis on his street from June until August. Their actions were disturbing people’s peace and quiet. Kids couldn’t fall asleep, and pets were traumatized. However, he was told by the dispatchers at 911 it would not be reported to the police, because they were short staffed and needed for emergencies. If the police were adequately staffed and able to respond to this “low-level” crime by taking the disruptors off the street, a near-by resident would not have been violently attacked and robbed by these same individuals. He sustained life-threatening injuries and spent three days in the ICU.
Minneapolis is a city of many neighborhoods. There are many people, each with their own experience of the City. But it is demeaning to those of us who are living in high crime areas to pretend that we don’t exist. That our experiences don’t matter. And when the rich and powerful take the time to shine a light on what is happening in our part of the City, they are discounted just like we are. If you don’t think crime is an issue in the City, please come to my neighborhood and experience a little of what I live with every day.
Excerpt from a Strib reader on crime being a real, vs. perceived issue: “The facts are that despite some declines in violent crime from recent peaks in 2021-22, violent crime in Minneapolis remained 45% higher in 2024 than it had been in 2018. Furthermore, despite representing just 7% of the state’s population, Minneapolis represents 33% of the state’s total number of violent crimes, 45% of its murders, 56% of its robberies and 78% of its carjackings.”
With a refreshed, new and improved City Council in 2026, there is hope. More about Denver from a Next Door comment about places that are providing examples for cities like Mpls..
This is what the Denver mayor said in his most recent state of the city speech:
“Now that encampments are gone and violent crime is among the lowest this century, we are turning our focus to the quality-of-life crimes — like theft or public drug use — that impact many of us on a daily basis,.
After spending the past two years ending downtown encampments and bringing thousands of people into shelter, Johnston described a new approach to people with mental health and substance issues and recurring criminal records.
“For those who are willing to accept treatment, we will keep them out of our criminal justice system entirely,” he said in the speech. “But for those who refuse services and continue to commit crimes, we will hold them accountable, and work with our partners in the criminal justice system to direct them toward services and treatment as part of their sentence.”
https://denverite.com/2025/08/25/denver-quality-of-life-crimes/
Thumbs up to that.
Check out this post on Nextdoor: https://nextdoor.com/p/TQr7JgxCJbNW?utm_source=share&extras=NzY4MzMyNDM%3D&ne_link_preview_links=&utm_campaign=1762864858021&share_action_id=fa024bb4-48d5-4651-b6fd-85d86b91a217
Council Member Osman put out this statement last night, 11/10. He was a victim of a car jacking.
Yep, juvenile crime is THE problem in Mpls.
Donna, thank you for writing this. I, too, was taken aback by the cluelessness of the Roper piece. In my lifetime, I have lived in Chicago proper, one of its outer suburbs, a Michigan college town, the East Bay area of Northern California (two of Oakland’s close suburbs), Woodbury, and South Minneapolis. One can find in ANY metropolitan area at least one area that is high crime, and at least one area that is, for all intents and purposes, devoid of crime. It’s not hard. Roper really needs to get out more. Characterizing the entire city based on his apparently quite limited personal experience was just breathtaking to me.
Where I live on the Southside would likely still be considered “low crime” (at least, I still consider it so), but it was one of those “practically no crime” areas when I first moved here, in ’91. And today, it is a trek of less than a mile to “high crime”. In the last ten years, I have adopted the practice of circling my car, which “lives” on the street, and “counting the windows” prior to opening the door. I also still eyeball the tires before getting in, for the sake of not damaging the rims by driving off on a slashed or deflated tire (which was a fashionable petty crime, briefly, PRIOR to all the window-breaking). Car vandalism was just not “a thing” for the first 25 years I lived here. For decades, I was a long-distance runner, and I literally ran “everywhere” in Minneapolis. I long since threw it away, but I once had a city streets map on which I had made a project of marking with a highlighter every street I had run. By the time I tired of the project, I had covered 85% of the city’s streets, and fear of crime was not even slightly a factor in not having gotten to the other 15%… I would not do this today. The sad fact is that things HAVE changed, and it’s really important that we deal with change with our eyes open. Roper’s piece basically is an argument for not doing that. Thanks again for writing yours.
I read that Eric Roper piece and also found it highly objectionable. Clueless, white, male privilege in a brilliant display. No, the entire city of Minneapolis is not burning up, that’s true, but Roper’s piece, with the sunflowers and the pristine bike path, just made me gag. I guess none of his beloved bike paths take his through Phillips or Seward, that must be why he comes off as a fatuous ignoramus.
And, thank you for this article: a much-needed correction to the record.
Having lived in north Minneapolis, Marcy Holmes, and Portland Avenue, I’ve been a victim of crime (property crimes) on numerous occasions. When I lived in Pittsburgh, I lived between two public housing projects, and experienced a couple of breakins. But I have a son who lives in Brooklyn New York and has lived there for 20 years, and his family has never had a problem with crime. What is it that Minneapolis can learn from Brooklyn?
We have a City Council that has virtually dragged its feet on helping the MPD obtain and keep enough police, to keep our neighborhoods safe and one that denigrates their police force at every turn. We have a City Council that lets those living in encampments decide for themselves if they want to stay addicted and give the users every kind of help to keep them addicted and on the street instead of working to get them inside and treated, and away from their dealers.
First of all, I am sorry for the harm you and some of your neighbors have experienced. Nobodies house should be broken into or vandalized, and nobody should be killed at knifepoint.
That being said, I have a genuine question. Your piece centers a lot on the homeless encampments that have popped up more and more frequently since the pandemic, and seems to place a lot of the blame for crime at the feet of vulnerable people congregating, and those that try and provide them resources.
I write this as someone who has worked with those very same homeless folks, addicts, and the disabled. And you are not wrong, dealers can be predatory, and can exploit people in a vulnerable situation. I’ve seen it happen many times. Addiction is a horrible, horrible thing, and I have seen many climb out of it, with the right supports. I have also seen others who did not get assistance never get out.
So my question is this. What would you rather be done about encampments? Would you just keep clearing them? In your piece you even say the most dangerous element seems to be the dealers.
The issue I raise about clearing encampments as a city policy comes from professional experience. I myself have had to go looking for clients who are missing throughout the city. I have good friends who work for official, trained, street outreach teams. This is not coming from experience of a volunteer as you have described.
When you have people doing outreach, the most important thing is building a relationship – creating a connection with someone. In my time at the shelter, I learned why this was important. Often, a homeless individual would come into the shelter cagey – wary of the staff, and unwilling to accept most assistance other than meals and some hygiene supplies. But after they settled in, and had time to feel comfortable, and get to know us – for some this took days, for others it could take weeks – most of the time they would open up. I would help them hunt for jobs, look at apartments, get vital identification documents, or work on a resume, among many other things. While I appreciate our city for even having an outreach group in the first place, I know from my professional experience that two or three conversations is generally not enough for someone to trust you, and to open up about what their real issues are. So, so many homeless folks I have met have been screwed over, abandoned, or hurt by organizations they took a chance on. It is incredibly common. I mean, take a look at the fraud coming out of the HSS programs! I know several clients who received no services, but their names were used to bill state insurance. I can’t really blame them for being wary.
Oftentimes, homeless folks do not have phones, or their phone will be stolen or broken, or even have the service cut off. There is no easier means of connecting with someone you are working with than speaking to them in person. A frustration I have heard from several friends who work on the outreach teams is that they will be building a relationship with someone who is sleeping outside, and get them in Coordinated Entry (HMIS), or connected with other resources. Sometimes they even are able to help them get a birth certificate, an ID, or medical care they need. But then, the place they are staying gets swept.
Sometimes they can’t find them for weeks – other times months – and in some unfortunate circumstances, they never see them again. I myself have been on the HMIS system and seen that someone I know has gotten a referral for housing – only to be unable to find them, and my connections in the field haven’t seen them either.
With the increase in sweeps, there is also further risk created. My neighbors and I have experienced homeless folks getting into our building, and sleeping in the basement. When it is illegal to sleep outside, I can see why some may take that option. But it can be unsafe for them, with some neighbors ready to take up arms – and dangerous for neighbors. Again, you are right, addiction is a big issue, and sometimes people can act erratically. We have children in our building – it is unfair for us. I’ve heard other stories like this to, so I know it is not an isolated incident. And when people go into insecure buildings or abandoned ones, it makes them even harder to find.
So, where should they go? Nobody likes encampments. Not homeless folks, not neighbors, and certainly not the city government. I am by no means arguing that encampments are a good thing, but moving our most vulnerable neighbors around, block by block, and forcing them to lie in the margins is not going to make the problem any better, in my opinion. It will just isolate more people, and cause our neighbors, housed or unhoused, to experience even more dangerous situations.
Thank you for your very thoughtful comment. You have given us the horrors of drug addiction from the experiences of the users and those who try to help them and I have given our readers the experiences of those who are forced to live around them. Both are untenable. In my article concerning high crime areas, one of the situations I focused on concerning crime was encampments because of the high volume of violence that happens when an encampment moves onto a block, mostly from the drug and human trafficking business that comes with them. Therefore, I couldn’t exactly ignore that issue.
Your description of the hardships of users and those who help them when camps are moved cannot be denied, along with your description of yours and friends’ experiences who were forced to ‘host’ the unsheltered addicted in the basements of your apartment buildings, especially with children living there. You wrote of how “unfair it is to us.” And it is, but now multiply that by hundreds, as hundreds of kids in these high crime neighborhoods have had to navigate around encampments for multiple summers. At the height of encampments parents kept their children inside all those summers.
Something that I didn’t write about is what these encampments are doing to our city. A friend of mine who lives less than two blocks away lost half her neighbors as she saw her once stable block destroyed by two separate encampments on her corner, both were there for over six months. Three houses were destroyed by fire and four households moved out of the city. If I am doing the math correctly, that’s 8 households, as one of the structures that burned down was an occupied duplex. It is not good for any city to lose stable neighborhoods and a tax base.
So, we can both agree that nobody can live with encampments. They do great harm on every level and to every side. Now, for the big question, “So where should they go?” I’m glad you asked, because I’ve been advocating for and emailing the mayor and the City Council with the solution since 2022. Here is what I and other neighbors, who have been dealing with encampments, have been proposing: Do not move the encampments out, move them to. Move them to shelter/housing, treatment and services and unlike outreach and all the other “harm reduction solutions” don’t wait for them to decide to go inside and get help. Don’t take no for an answer.
When I say something like this, I always get the same response, that treatment won’t work if the addicted person doesn’t want to go. However, data has shown that the same percentage of those who were forced into going by family and/or friends who stay clean is around the same percentage as those who were eager to go. Some who wanted to go return to using and some who didn’t want to stay clean and sober. Another response I get is that people have rights. You can’t just force them off the street and into treatment. And that’s true, unless they are standing before a judge and given one of two choices, jail or treatment. In the 1990s when we lived in a well-run city and we were well-funded by the federal government, especially through a federal program known as Weed & Seed that had funds for stressed neighborhoods like the ones I write about, there was such a thing as drug court. People who broke the law dealing and/or using drugs were given the choice of going to jail or going to treatment. Some chose jail, but most chose treatment. People who break the law have the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney, but they don’t have the right to do illegal drugs on the street. They are breaking the law. However, I am not advocating for prison sentences, I’m advocating for housing, treatment and services for that kind of lawbreaking.
Some of the many advantages of approaching unsheltered drug use in this way is that the very hardships you wrote about for the addicted would be solved. Relationships would be formed between outreach/social workers and others working to get clean. Trust would be built as the workers would have lots of uninterrupted time with their clients, because no one would be moving them along to places where they couldn’t be found. IDs and documents would not be lost and even if the clients didn’t have a phone there would be access to one in a treatment center.
This is a simple solution, but a very hard one to implement. We would first need enough police to arrest people breaking drug laws. As it is, the police don’t even give as much as a ticket to dealers much less users. With the City Council we have, that isn’t going to happen. Another problem with implementing these solutions is the way the City Council approaches the problem of waiting for the users to decide, giving them everything they need to stay on the street and continue to use instead of working to get them inside, off the street and treated, the way we would treat any other life-threatening disease. And finally, we will need more funding. This isn’t a cheap solution.
CM Chowdhury likes to reference Denver, as a city doing good work. What she fails to say, and has not been honest about, is that the DSA voting block, which she is a member of, would reject most of what Denver has done to address this problem.
Denver’s Outreach with Enforcement Approach to Homelessness | Minneapolis Times
https://minneapolistimes.com/denvers-outreach-with-enforcement-approach-to-homelessness/
Excerpt.. “Increased Numbers of Police Make It Possible to Remove Camps Quickly and Deter Reoccurrences Denver is now camp-free. Part of what has made this successful is that Denver has been rapidly hiring more police. They added 300 new officers in 2024 and 2025. This was funded, in part, by voters approving a downtown investment package that was used to fund a dedicated downtown police unit with horses, bikes, motorcycles, and foot patrols. As a result, foot traffic in downtown is up, leasing of office space has increased, and local restaurants report revenue gains from 30% to 100%.”
That’s what I’m talking about!
I thought Lutherans were nicer to people that are struggling.
Let me get this straight Is being “nice” allowing people to victimize us? To allow people to clunk us over the head, rub us and put us in the hospital for 3 days? to allow dealers to sell drugs that eventually kill users if untreated? To allow traffickers to traffick young women? To allow users and dealers to congregate in front of our charities making it difficult to impossible to enter and get help? To allow your city lawmakers to rule by a misguided ideology, making it impossible for the underserved (BIPOC, low-income, and working class) to get the protection from crime that they need? If that’s your definition of “nice” then you can count this Lutheran out!