A Research Section
Who the Law Helps, Who It Hurts
How Minnesota's laws land differently by race, income, age, disability, and geography
Photo: Dave Madgett • Grand PortageHow Minnesota's laws land differently by race, income, age, disability, and geography
Photo: Dave Madgett • Grand PortageState agency tables, court records, Census and BLS files, sentencing data. Linked, so you can check the work.
A disparity is a rate, not a count. Every one is stated per 100,000, per capita, or as a share of the population it is drawn from.
Offense mix, geography, age, income. If a gap has a benign cause, it gets said before anything else does.
No manufactured outrage. Each piece ends with a concrete reform, scaled to what an Attorney General or the Legislature can actually do.
Across 273 Minnesota school systems in school year 2017-18 — the most recent year both federal files can be joined — the correlation between revenue per pupil and reading proficiency is negative, −0.45. That is not a finding about money. It is an artifact of a formula that sends dollars toward measured need: economic disadvantage alone explains 62 percent of the district-level variation in reading, and adding revenue to the model moves the explained share from 0.645 to 0.649. What the public files can and cannot answer, which dataset would answer it, and who would have to publish it.
ReadThe charity-care statute sets no income line — the hospital's own policy does. The one income number in Minnesota's charity-care law, 275 percent of the federal poverty guideline, is a reporting category in an administrative rule, not a right. The screening duty reaches uninsured patients and hospitals, not insured patients and not clinics. And the state's own hospital file shows $202.8 million written off as bad debt in 2024 rather than as charity care.
ReadRed Lake County has zero certified nursing homes. Seventeen more counties have one building each, at a median of 46 beds, and nine of those seventeen have already lost one since 2012. But the closures do not track population loss — in all 40 counties that lost a nursing home, the 65-and-over population was larger in 2024 than in 2020. What separates the counties is not who closed. It is who got replaced.
ReadOne adjustment formula governs the homestead, the car, the tools, and the wildcard. On July 1, 2026 it moved the homestead cap 5.9 percent and the ordinary motor-vehicle cap 2.0 percent, because each raise is a slice of a base amount and the car's base is still $2,000. Two exemptions are excluded from the formula by name and have sat at $13,000 since 1989 — down 62.7 percent in purchasing power. And the state's own notice of the new figures was wrong twice before it was right.
ReadMinn. Stat. § 13.824 requires the BCA to post the locations of fixed automated license plate readers on its website, and it does: as of September 10, 2026, 116 agencies, 747 named locations, 17 more withheld as security information. Statewide, camera density tracks city size, not race. Inside Minneapolis, the 28 mappable readers sit in tracts that are 39.0 percent non-Hispanic white against 58.0 percent citywide — and once you hold the arterial and the reported crime rate constant, that gap disappears. The disclosure law works. The published list is still a text file with no coordinates, no counts, and no dates.
ReadMinnesota's pretrial share of the jail population climbed from 50 percent in 2010 to 68 percent in 2019. The Rules of Criminal Procedure require a judge to set a cash figure that buys release with no conditions at all, which means the same defendant walks or stays depending on what is in the bank. Jail rates per 100,000: 107 white, 685 Black, 1,255 Native American. And a rule already on the books that nobody enforces.
ReadA flat fee is a percentage that shrinks as income rises. Minnesota's $75 conviction surcharge is identical for a felony and a petty misdemeanor, the minimum fine underneath it is fixed at 30 percent of the statutory maximum and by law cannot be waived, and getting a revoked license back can cost $680. Minnesota already fixed the worst piece of this. Here is what is left, and the fix the state has already written into another statute.
ReadThe Sentencing Guidelines Commission's own 2024 tables: 1,243 Black adults sentenced per 100,000, against 201 white; American Indians at 1,809. Yet at the sentencing hearing, judges cut prison time below the guideline more often for Black defendants than white ones. The disparity is built upstream, in who gets charged and in the guideline grid itself. What the numbers show, what they can't, and what to change.
ReadFines, fees, and the $75 surcharge (who a flat fee actually falls on) • Cash bail and who sits in jail before trial • Homestead and debtor exemptions (who loses the car and the wildcard) • Where the license-plate cameras are placed • Long-term-care closures by county • School funding and reading outcomes by district and income • Medical-debt protections, who they reach and who falls through.
Have a dataset that belongs here? campaign@madgettformn.com