Data Justice

How a Carleton statistics project is making a real-world impact in one of Minneapolis’s most diverse neighborhoods.

How do crime and policing in Ward 9 compare to other parts of Minneapolis? Are there geographic areas that are more likely to have use-of-force incidents coded as “suspicious people”? How have use-of-force incidents changed before, during, and after the George Floyd protests?

These are just a few of the community-prompted questions that a multi-year Carleton Academic Civic Engagement (ACE) project has sought to answer. Collaboratively led by Assistant Professor of Statistics Claire Kelling and Minneapolis-based Confluence: An East Lake Studio for Community Design, the Data / Justice Lab is an ongoing project that explores the intersection of qualitative and quantitative information. The result? Real-world impact for the residents in Ward 9, which is both one of the city’s most diverse areas and one of its most policed.

“The guiding question for our work is, What kind of world do we want to live in?” says Duaba Unenra, who cofounded Confluence Studio to merge ideas and action to help reshape societal landscapes. “We wanted to tap into the creativity and desire for social transformation that exists inside college students, especially at a place like Carleton.

“At the same time, we acknowledge how much genius exists within our community members, who have very valuable lessons to teach—especially about how grimy governance of our city is,” he adds. “We’ve had the unfortunate fortune of having spaces like the Third Precinct and circumstances like police violence against our community to serve as classrooms, so to speak. The homework is to try to transform these conditions, to try to end these social problems.”

Unenra and Confluence cofounder Sam Gould live and work in Minneapolis’s Ward 9, which is situated at the heart of the city and comprises the Central, Corcoran, East Phillips, Midtown Phillips, Howe, Longfellow, and Powderhorn Park neighborhoods. That includes bustling East Lake Street and Franklin Avenue (both major thoroughfares dotted with minority-owned small businesses) as well as Little Earth of United Tribes, the country’s only Indigenous-preference, project-based Section 8 rental assistance housing complex. Indeed, the area is home to the city’s largest Native American and Latino populations as well as robust East African and LGBTQIA+ populations—groups that have a long history witnessing contentious policing practices.

Ward 9 is also home to the Third Precinct, a station at the heart of key moments in the neighborhood’s history with police. The American Indian Movement was founded nearby in 1968, partly in response to the conduct of officers based here. And it made international headlines in 2020 when it burned during the unrest that broke out after the police killing of George Floyd. The murder—which contributed to a global racial reckoning around policing—was just one example of the types of police brutality, both everyday and extreme, that this project aims to investigate by layering empirical evidence (city-provided statistical data) onto the anecdotal (the lived experiences of area residents).

For the Confluence Studio founders, this is far more than just research; it’s an investment in their home. “This work is not about studying the neighborhood,” Gould explains. “It’s about how we show up in this place that we call home. It’s about how we steward this place for our kids and our neighbors’ kids, who will be living here decades from now. This is generational work, and it starts with us.”

Making meaning with statistics

Working closely with the Confluence Studio team, Claire Kelling and her students translated this big-picture ambition into an actionable academic project, beginning in 2022. They mapped publicly available Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) data about use-of-force incidents within Ward 9 dating back to 2021 to create an interactive online app that’s free and available for anyone to use. It highlights hot spots of high activity and lets users search by criteria including the force type and problem reported, as well as the race and sex of the civilian.

So what exactly does “use of force” mean? Although there is no universal definition, the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice deems it a “last option” to be used to restore safety only when other practices have proven ineffective. Local police departments set their own standards, and individual officers determine when and how to employ use-of-force methods, including firearms, tasers, handcuffs, chemical irritants, and bodily force, among others. (It should be noted that not all cities make use-of-force data publicly available.)

It’s a topic that has been in the news more and more of late due to situations like George Floyd’s murder and recent college campus protests. And given its subjective nature, it’s also a topic that’s ripe for researching.

For Ward 9 dwellers, the Data / Justice Lab expands upon their lived experiences—experiences that are all too often minimized, overlooked, or altogether invalidated. From January 2008 until October 2023, there were 3,071 reported use-of-force incidents in Ward 9, 370 of which were reported to be because of a “suspicious person.” From these 370 cases, the vast majority (91.9 percent) were not the result of a 911 call. “Incidents involving a suspicious person are of interest to us, because this type of incident can imply officer subjectivity, especially when the call is not initiated by a 911 call,” explains Kelling.

“For the first time, people have been able to visualize these narratives of police brutality that are so commonplace in our community in a really tangible way,” says Unenra. “[This project] has affirmed what a lot of people already knew: that the really raw, violent experiences they have experienced with MPD aren’t isolated. Claire and the students found a way to make something that can largely be interpreted as intangible—like the data points in the spreadsheet that the police department collects—tangible and to make it meaningful.”

Making meaning with data has long been paramount for Kelling, whose work sits at the intersection of criminology and spatial statistics. “When I first came to Carleton, I wanted to ensure that my statistical work wasn’t happening in a silo, that it was instead serving some purpose outside of the academic ivory tower,” she says. “Data is typically situated in a context, and statistical work often involves interdisciplinary collaboration with people who know more about that context, like sociologists, biologists, and criminologists. But in order to understand how this data exists in a community context, it’s important to work with community members.”

That’s where the collaboration with Confluence Studio was crucial, given the organization’s strong community roots. The project partners tapped into those close-knit connections in order to better understand how Ward 9 residents could benefit from a more readily comprehensible presentation of policing data about this place they call home. Together, they hosted dialogues in Minneapolis so that Kelling and her students could hear directly from community members about their experiences, their concerns, and their questions (including the aforementioned ones). In turn, they shared their findings with the community during in-person meetings. With each round of analysis came new inquiries, which in turn prompted more research, yielding a symbiotic circle of life of sorts.

Ensuring community participation like this stands in stark contrast to the often extractive, at times exploitative research practices of the past that were often about a community—especially marginalized groups—but not with a community. In this case, not only did Ward 9 dwellers engage with the study; they actually co-directed it. 

This kind of relationship is due in part to initiatives like Carleton’s Center for Community and Civic Engagement. The center aims to break down the barriers between the academic world and the real world through ACE projects and courses like this. It’s where “Carleton students go to burst their Carleton bubble,” says Associate Director for Academic Civic Engagement and Scholarship Emily Seru, who was instrumental in facilitating the community connections that made this project such a success.

“Community-engaged teaching is really about switching the historic dynamic between the academy and the community,” she notes. “We’re shifting to the idea of co-creation, instead of the academy coming in and imposing our ideas, our questions, and our priorities onto the community. When the people who are experts in their own lives and who are closest to the issues are driving the research, that’s the real tipping point.”

Classroom in the community

The result of those efforts is academic work that impacts not only the community involved but also collaborating students. “This kind of learning can be really transformational for college students, because it’s a high-impact practice where you’re not just learning abstractly about a theory—you’re getting a chance to learn from people who aren’t your professors in a complex, real-world situation,” Seru explains. “Often, students will point to courses like this as the lightbulb moment in terms of their internal motivation as to what they want to study and why. They realize that this is real. These are real people. This has real-world impact.”

That was certainly the case for students involved with the Data / Justice Lab, like statistics major Caroline Gans ’26. “I have always tried to be engaged with my community as much as possible,” she says, pointing to past nonprofit involvement during her high-school days. “I hope that the work we did will make use-of-force data easier to understand for a wider audience, because the government publishes a lot of information, but not many people look at it.”

For her, the teachings go beyond the data. “One thing I learned through [this work] is that it’s important and gratifying to stay connected to your local political environment,” Gans notes. “A lot of college students are very politically engaged, but the focus goes to a macro/federal level. Spending an entire term really intensely focused on following state and local policies reminded me that oftentimes these policies have even greater impact than national ones do.”

Kai Zhang ’25, who recently graduated with a degree in statistics and economics, had been involved with the project since his sophomore year. “It’s very rewarding that we as college students get a chance to get involved in this kind of real-world research,” he says. “It’s very different moving from a classroom project to a real application. It’s a way to give back to the community, which honestly has helped me a lot in terms of personal growth.”

The power of knowledge

What might on the face of it seem like a straightforward task has had its fair share of challenges along the way. Like, for example, when the MPD changed the information it shares publicly in 2024, shortly after the Data / Justice Lab kicked off. Key information was eliminated, such as whether a use-of-force incident followed a 911 call, if someone resisted an officer, and if anyone was injured. When asked about this during a March 2025 KSTP interview, MPD Chief Brian O’Hara explained that the removal of these details was the result of the rollout of a new Use of Force Dashboard and that the previous system was producing “incorrect data.”

But Gould believes that this shrouding of information happened in direct response to the Data / Justice Lab, particularly because the change took place shortly after he and the team notified Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey about the patterns they were noticing through their data analysis process.

“I spoke with the mayor personally, and shortly after me speaking with him, the information got scrubbed,” he says. “It made it difficult if not impossible for us to do the analysis we were doing. We aren’t able to link up experience with data.”

Minnesota Department of Human Rights (MDHR) court-mandated reforms require that the MPD add back in a list of injuries resulting from force as well as the number and nature of injuries to officers who used force. Per the KSTP report, O’Hara explained that “That’s in progress, and hopefully, we’ll have that completed and available online very soon.” He went on to add, “We can absolutely look at making more information available if that’s something that people actually want. But the heaviest lift now is figuring out, how do we get the technology in place to capture all of the things that we need to capture [to comply with the MDHR mandate].”

Gould and Unenra wrote to O’Hara in March requesting a chance to meet to discuss this effort; in the ensuing seven months, there has been no reply. (The department also did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.)

The suppression of that once publicly available information underscores the importance of this work. “The last living archive of that data is with our Data / Justice Lab,” says Unenra. “So it exists to provide a counternarrative to what MPD and the city enterprise are saying about how it creates safety, specifically for Black, Brown, Native, Latino, queer, and trans folks along two of its major corridors through one of its most diverse neighborhoods.”

Rather than being discouraged by these obstacles or the potentially disheartening study results, Kelling remains optimistic about what can be done with this powerful knowledge. “I’m hopeful that our analysis can help support conversations about reform in Minneapolis,” she says. “But that’s not up to me; part of working with the community is letting them drive those conversations.”

Already, the Confluence Studio cofounders have witnessed that at play. As Unenra explains, “We’ve had really brilliant, really hardcore organizers who do street outreach tell us, ‘This is the first time that I’ve ever seen any information laid out like this, and it’s transforming how I do my work, because now it’s not just numbers on a piece of paper.’ Together with Claire and her students, we were able to produce something that’s actually useful for everyone.”

Ultimately, it comes back to centering humans, rather than numbers, at the heart of research. Because data alone can’t effect change—people can. And it’s those people—like Gould, Unenra, and their Ward 9 neighbors—who can help build the kind of world we want to live in. 

An Alaska Native Tlingit tribal member, Kate Nelson is an award-winning independent journalist based in Minneapolis who focuses on amplifying important Indigenous change makers and issues. 

Mike McQuade is an artist and illustrator based in Richmond, Va.