Foreclosures Feeding Crime

While Washington dithers about how to deal with the mortgage meltdown, one urban neighborhood is enduring a crime wave in abandoned homes. In a candid interview, Rich Jackson, a cop on Minneapolis’s North Side, the most foreclosed area in the entire state, tells Minnesota Monitor about rampant theft, parties and prostitution in the area. The police department, he says, is distracted by politics.

They have a lot going on with the RNC, the Republican convention, that’s huge. And convention protesters are absorbing a lot of the department resources for the past month or so. But is that an excuse to neglect local neighborhoods?