Poll: Minnesotans largely feel safe, but Black women most likely to worry about safety

LeQue Curtis was reaching for her mailbox last November, when she heard the crack of gunfire. 

It was an apparent homicide, just steps away from her apartment building in St. Paul. Now, she said, she no longer allows her son to wait for the school bus. He can go outside once it’s arrived and not one minute sooner.

That incident alone would make safety feel elusive, but for Curtis, there’s an additional, heavy layer.  

“Black women just don’t feel protected,” she said. “It just makes it harder to live day to day.”

Curtis was among the 3,399 Minnesotans who responded to a Lumaris survey gauging perceptions of public safety across the state — where crime rates vary but have broadly decreased to the lowest level in more than three decades.

An analysis from MPR News' sister organization APM Research Lab found that while the majority of Minnesotans reported feeling safe most of the time, a quarter of respondents said a fear of crime impacts their activities often or somewhat often.

For Black women who responded, that number doubled to nearly 50 percent.

This comes as no surprise to Curtis, who keeps to herself, avoids new places and never leaves the house without arming herself with mace. She says the disproportionate response “only makes sense.”

“Being a Black woman, it’s hard for people to see us as somebody that needs help,” she said. “You know you’re not getting that same protection as your neighbor or somebody who doesn’t look like you.”

Curtis remembers calling the police after an ex-partner came around unannounced and broke a porchlight — his voice rising in a way that made her reach for the phone. After the police arrived, she wished she hadn’t called them. Despite her fear, they were dismissive, she said,  asking her: “Is this it?”

She said although she has six brothers, she avoids enlisting them in scary situations. She’s afraid that if law enforcement arrived, her brothers would be at risk of being hurt by the police. 

Survey results are no surprise 

Former state legislator and the current President and CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States, Ruth Richardson, said the survey results don’t surprise her, either — largely because of other numbers she can rattle off easily. The type that are hard to forget. 

Nationally, Richardson noted, Black women in the U.S. are six times more likely to die by homicide than white women.

In Minnesota, Black women are three times more likely to be murdered than their white peers, and cases investigating missing Black women stay open four times as long as cases involving white women.

While Black women make up less than 7 percent of the population, they comprise more than 40 percent of reported domestic violence cases.

The local statistics are from a report that the Missing and Murdered African American Women Task Force submitted to the state Legislature in 2023. The nation-leading initiative was spearheaded by Richardson, who said dedicating the resources to protecting Black women and girls was a priority to her from day one at the capitol.

It derived, in part, from personal experience. When she was a first-grader, Richardson went missing. After getting on the wrong school bus, she spent hours wandering from unfamiliar house to unfamiliar house — seeking a friendly face to help bring her home. 

“I’ll never forget how many doors I had to knock on,” she said. “Before someone saw me as worthy of being helped.”

Richardson said at the time, she couldn’t connect the dots that she does now: “then you know exactly what was going on.” 

A new approach 

That task force also recommended creating a new office — the Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls Office — which opened earlier this year as the first in the nation. 

Housed in the state’s department of public safety, that office is intended to tackle systemic violence against Black women and girls, facilitate communication with law enforcement, advocate for policies that promote equity and get at the root causes. 

“The work is just beginning,” Richardson said. “And it’s ensuring that we’re continuing to make black women and girls a priority to protect, because they’re deserving of protection.”

A healing journey

Still, for 34-year-old A’Bryana Ware, tangible safety disparities are why she’s enrolling both herself and her 13-year-old daughter in self-defense classes. She knows Black girls are overrepresented in sex trafficking victims, so she checks her daughter’s location to make sure she’s made it safely to school. 

“I’m of the mindset of, if we can’t trust the world to protect us, then how are we going to protect ourselves?” she said. 

But Ware added she doesn’t want to let that fear rule their lives. She remembers how her own mother parented her with fear and doesn’t want to feed that energy into her young daughter — even if she knows firsthand how scary it can be to navigate the world as a Black woman.

In 2019, Ware was attacked by a man, but she avoided calling the police because he was Black. She was afraid of what could happen if police escalated the situation and hurt him, or if she were to be blamed.

After that, she poured her energy into creating Black Women Speak, so she and other Black women would have space to unpack the reality of their experiences. The first event focused on misogynoir — a term that describes the intersection of anti-Black racism and sexism. It was a beautiful event, she said. Women told their stories through dance and poetry, followed by community conversation. 

Ware started a biweekly discussion on healing at Augsburg University, called Black Women Heal. Another event, Black Girl Joy: Healing in the Park, gave joy a front seat, bringing women together to work with healers, share laughter and play Double Dutch.  

“It was through pain, through that trauma that I was starting to create space for Black women to share their experiences, so we don’t internalize these things,” she said. “Not being allowed to fully express anger, which is rightful, is damaging to the body, mentally, physically.”

Stress, trauma and discrimination can be linked to elevated risks for health problems for people of color. In her own life, Ware said her health took a physical hit after years of internalization. She was diagnosed with somatic symptom disorder, causing her to hyper focus on health issues that emerged. It started with heart palpitations and obsessively checking her heart rate on a phone app; then she developed a digestive disorder around the same time. 

Eventually, she put Black Women Speak on a hiatus. 

“When I had that attack, I just went into work mode. Instead of putting that energy into me, I was like ‘other Black women are feeling like this, I need to help,’” she said. “A lot of Black women have this save the world syndrome, where we’re trying to save the community and everybody, except for ourselves.”

But as she’s leaned into genuine personal care — eating right, exercising, practicing yoga and welcoming patience in — and as she’s practiced careful media consumption with healthy boundaries, she said she’s finally reaching a place where she’s ready to start up programming again. 

And this time, she said, she’ll make sure she has the support, so she isn’t carrying all of that alone. 

She hopes that comes from beyond herself and other Black women. 

“It’s imperative for Black women just to have the support of the community … whether that be supporting an organization or being an advocate for a Black women,” she said. “I think a lot of Black women feel unsupported and the burden of that falls on us.”

Editor’s note: Detailed poll results and complete methodology are available in a report prepared by APM Research Lab, MPR News’ sister organization.

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