Neighbors, city work to put a 'big stop' to crime

For almost 15 years, the Big Stop convenience store was a big blight on the neighborhood around 26th and Knox avenues in north Minneapolis' Jordan neighborhood. Drug dealers used it as a base of operations. Trouble requiring the police was an everyday thing, and in 2004, gangsters pursued a young man into the store and shot him execution-style.

"It was a parasitic relationship - the store needed the drug dealers and the drug dealers needed the store," says Deb Wagner, a long-time resident. "When cops would come by, the dealers ... would just duck into the store or hide their stash in the litter in the parking lot. There was almost nothing the police could do."

Good folks began to flee the neighborhood of charming 1920s bungalows, says Wagner. They were tired of the fear, the bone-rattling "boom cars," the filthy, trash-clogged streets. Many mornings, as Wagner walked her daughter to the school bus stop, she stuffed garbage bags with the used pot bags and Styrofoam trays dripping with barbecue sauce that dealers and their customers left behind.

Irate residents deluged City Hall with complaints. "Over and over, I'd say, "Why don't we get a health inspector in there?" says Wagner.

"It's dirty, the produce is always wilted, and the cans on the shelves are dented," she said.

But all she got was temporary fixes. "Every now and then, someone from the city would come out and clean up the litter, but within a day or two it was back to the way it was."

By 2002, residents launched weekly, sign-waving protests across the street from Big Stop, and wrote a letter to the governor documenting intolerable neighborhood conditions.

Then, on April 4, 2006, the city shook off its paralysis and revoked Big Stop's license. Overnight, police calls in the neighborhood plunged.

The change didn't stop there. In the next 14 months, the city closed seven more trouble-prone stores in other neighborhoods. Three of the stores together were responsible for nearly 1,600 police calls in 2005. In 2007, those three locations had 53 calls.

Wagner and her friends owe their newfound peace to a revolutionary city initiative - the Grocery Store Task Force. The Task Force grew out of a high-tension meeting between North Side residents and city officials in early 2006, which sent shaken officials back to the drawing board to examine the link between crime prevention and livability issues in a new way.

Rocco Forte of Regulatory Services explains the fundamental insight behind the Task Force. "We quickly figured out if a store had 400 police calls, there's a nexus between that and other problems there," he says. "We decided to find out all the reasons the property was a magnet for crime, and deal with them in a single comprehensive action."

The city stopped dividing responsibility for problems like exposed garbage, torn fences, expired food products and structural defects among many isolated departments. "In the past, we'd have 10 interactions by different departments over 10 years, then slap the owner on the wrist and nothing would change," explained Burt Osborne of Regulatory Services. Today, a trouble-prone property such as Big Stop is viewed "as a city crime and livability problem, rather than a series of departmental problems."

With this wealth of data at their fingertips, staff members meet with a store owner and present a list of changes to stay in business. If he or she fails to comply, the city revokes his license.

At Big Stop, for example, the city required the property owner to enclose a dumpster, mend a fence and close a curb cut to prevent drug buyers from circulating through the parking lot. When he failed to do so, the city had grounds to shut down the business.

Elsewhere, the Task Force has required owners to stop selling drug dealer supplies, such as single cigarettes and metallic scrubbing pads like Chore Boy used as filters for smoking crack. It has mandated security cameras and earlier closing times. Police and inspectors check frequently at stores being monitored to assess compliance.

Increasingly, convenience store owners are policing themselves. "Within one week of closing Big Stop, we had over two dozen owners calling us to set up meetings, asking 'What do we need to do?'" said Forte. "They don't want to get on our list."

Today, other cities are calling to learn the secret of Minneapolis' crime-fighting success. Toledo, Ohio, for example, recently launched a program modeled on the Grocery Store Task Force.