During the summer of 2006, after a seemingly random killing of young white man in Uptown, I suggested to an MPR News editor that we look into the rising violent crime rate and see what was going on. At first, there was resistance to the idea: North Minneapolis is gripped by violent crime … just because one white man was killed didn’t mean that rising violent crime was suddenly a significant trend.
But I felt that the killing in Uptown, and one soon after in Downtown Minneapolis, represented a troubling escalation in violence and suggested something was changing. I suggested we query the Network to find out if crime was indeed more rampant than statistics were telling us. We received a strong response which suggested that crime was far more of a concern than we had known. That query and one that followed led to two stories. I encouraged one of our producers to report a piece that explored rising crime through the stories of the people from our Public Insight Network who were experiencing it. I also came up with the idea of getting a North Minneapolis native and rapper named Shakademic to report on rising violent crime from his point of view. His “rap-portage” was featured on our new show In the Loop for its “Crime Hits Home” episode.