Source: startribune.com 4/20/25
Officials question whether residency restrictions in other cities are pushing more registered offenders to Brooklyn Park.
Matt Rabe, an inspector with the Brooklyn Park Police Department, answered a call that sparked a lot of questions.
Rabe said the caller was trying to place a registered predatory offender in Brooklyn Park after a neighboring suburb had turned them down due to their city’s residency restrictions.
Brooklyn Park doesn’t have an ordinance limiting where convicted sex offenders are allowed to live, but is surrounded by suburbs that do. The ordinances require registered offenders, often only those deemed to be at the highest risk of re-offending, to reside a certain distance away from schools, parks and other gathering areas.
More than 90 Minnesota cities have enacted such bans, creating a patchwork of residency rules that make many parts of the state off-limits to registered offenders who have served their time and are seeking housing. Brooklyn Park officials are now considering passing their own restrictions, as they question whether neighboring cities’ laws are part of the reason a higher number of offenders reside in their community.
“It’s pretty hard to look at the map and say there isn’t some sort of connection,” Rabe said.
Brooklyn Park has roughly 220 registered sex offenders living in the city. Of those, 19 were deemed to be “level three,” or at the highest risk of re-offending, as of April 10. Golden Valley had eight of those offenders, while Maple Grove had three and Brooklyn Center had two. Champlin, Robbinsdale and Bloomington all had one.
“I think it is clear that these ordinances can have the effect of skewing where people who are re-entering society can live. And they certainly can have the effect of pushing people from one place to another,” said Eric Janus, retired professor and dean at Mitchell Hamline College of Law, who authored a book on sex offender laws.
“My thought is that it’s not very smart to leave it up to each locality to decide something as important as this,” Janus said. “It should be a state policy, so you don’t have this disproportionate effect.”
“City leaders say a disproportionately high number of 911 calls come from the facilities.”
Shocking. Group homes specifically established to house individuals with mental or substance abuse issues get a lot of 911 calls. What do you want to bet that not a single damn one of those “disproportionately high number of 911 calls” are to report an actual or attempted sex crime?
When we lived in Minnesota Brooklyn Park is where we lived. I was always told Brooklyn Park was called Brooklyn Dark and the city officials must have dark souls. Yes, let’s add residency restrictions and send those undesirables elsewhere. Minnesota the Gutless State