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Over the past five years, hundreds of people in Polk County, Minnesota, have been charged with possessing drugs in “drug-free zones” despite not setting foot on those properties.
They include two young men who admitted to police they previously used drugs at one of their parents’ houses, which is across the street from a school.
A homeless man suspected of stealing two candy bars from a convenience store got a drug-free zone charge because police found him walking across a bridge near a park.
A woman in Crookston, Polk County, was charged because her vehicle was in the parking lot of an apartment complex that happened to be within a block of a park.
Minnesota, like virtually every other state, imposes enhanced penalties for drug crimes committed in the vicinity of a school, park or public housing — drug-free zones, in legal parlance. And in Minnesota, those zones encompass not just the property itself, but also the area up to one block around it.
Violations of Minnesota’s drug-free zone statutes are uncommon. They make up just a sliver — about 1% — of all drug crimes charged in the state. They’re also much less common than many other criminal offenses, like disorderly conduct, domestic assault, DWI or trespassing.
But things are different in Polk County, a largely rural county in the northern Red River Valley in the state’s northwest. After traffic infractions like speeding and DWI, drug-free zone offenses like the ones cited above were the most commonly charged crimes in the county between 2019 and 2023, according to data from the Minnesota Judicial Branch.
During those years there were 1,621 drug-free zone possession charges in the entire state. Prosecutors in Polk County, home to about 0.5% of the state population, filed 40% of them.
The unusual charging practices, first reported by the Grand Forks Herald last year, are drawing the attention of civil liberties advocates and defense attorneys, who say authorities there are pushing the letter of the law to its very limit in order to impose severe penalties on people with substance abuse problems.
“I have not had the experience of working anywhere else where the drug charges are so non-standard, and so punitive,” said Bruce Ringstrom, a Moorhead defense attorney who has represented clients in Polk County.
As a consequence, the incarceration rate in Polk County is roughly triple the state average.
Polk County Attorney Greg Widseth, who was first elected to the office in 2002 and has run unopposed in every election since then, did not respond to requests for comment.
Aggressive pursuits
While schools and parks are a feature of virtually every Minnesota county, none of them approach Polk County in terms of the sheer number of prohibited zone offenses charged.
Minneapolis, for instance, has roughly 180 parks and 100 schools, but Hennepin County authorities only charged about two dozen drug-free zone possession offenses between 2019 and 2023 — roughly one-thirtieth the number charged in Polk County, which is home to just 30,000 people.
Advocates are especially concerned by one Polk County law enforcement practice in particular: Officers pull over suspected drug users, and if illicit substances or paraphernalia are found in the car, the officers ask what route the driver took prior to the stop.
If authorities deduce that the route took the vehicle past a school or park, they charge the driver with a drug-free zone offense, regardless of whether or not officers directly witnessed the offense, and regardless of whether the suspect spent any time in the prohibited zone or simply drove past it in the course of their day.
Last year, for instance, one woman received a drug-free zone charge because she told East Grand Forks officers she had previously driven on one of the city’s main thoroughfares, which goes past a park.
“It seems like an innocuous thing to do, to tell a police officer where you’ve been throughout the day,” said Kurtis Hanna, a drug reform lobbyist previously with Minnesota NORML. But for people found in possession of drugs or paraphernalia, “the ramifications of answering that question are so big, and I don’t think most people realize it.”
Authorities in Polk County are essentially using schools and parks “to enhance charges against people who happen to be addicts, and driving past a school or park to get from point A to B,” Ringstrom said.
The enhanced charges cause defendants’ criminal history scores to “go through the roof,” he added. “What it means is if they ever get charged again, Polk County has saddled them with so much history they send them away to prison for a long time.”
On a per-capita basis, Polk County — along with the two smaller neighboring counties it shares a corrections system with — sends more people to prison and jail than any other county in the state, according to data from the Vera Institute of Justice.
The total statewide incarceration rate, which includes people serving time in state prisons as well as local jails, was 360 inmates per 100,000 people ages 15 to 64 in 2022, according to Vera’s data.
In Polk County and its two smaller neighbors, the rate is 1,417 inmates per 100,000 — more than three times the statewide average.
There’s no disagreement that Polk County, like virtually every county in the United States, has an illicit drug problem. Many of the people charged with drug-free zone offenses have lengthy law enforcement records as a result of their drug use, and in many cases they are also found to be committing other serious offenses, like driving under the influence, at the time of their arrest.
But researchers have generally found that aggressively punitive approaches do little to solve the underlying problem of substance abuse.
“People are using drugs because they’re having issues in their lives,” Hanna said. “The criminal justice approach of penalizing these people exacerbates their alienation. They’re having a harder time being a member of their community because they have the scarlet letter of being a convicted felon or facing felony charges.”
A relic of the War on Drugs
Minnesota’s prohibited zone law is a product of the Reagan-era War on Drugs and the 1980s crack epidemic. It was signed into law in 1989, spearheaded by then-DFL Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III and DFL Rep. Peter McLaughlin of Minneapolis.
“We need to have tough laws on the books to keep [schools and parks] from becoming centers for drug trafficking and use,” McLaughlin told the St. Paul Recorder. The report notes that Minnesota’s law was the first in the nation designating parks as drug-free zones in addition to schools.
Crucially, Minnesota’s drug-free zones extend 300 feet or one block, whichever distance is greater, from the property line of the location in question. That allows authorities to charge people simply for walking or driving in the general vicinity of a school or park, even if they never set foot in those places.
It also means that municipalities wishing to take a punitive approach to drug use can designate public lands as “parks” in order to facilitate more prohibited zone offenses.
In 2019, for instance, the East Grand Forks City Council passed a resolution, at the request of the Polk County Attorney’s Office, to update its list of designated parks “as an aid to prosecution of drug-dealers and possessors.” The list includes neighborhood parks established many decades ago, as well as the entirety of the Greenway Recreational Area — a sprawling natural zone abutting the city’s rivers that was created in part to protect residential neighborhoods from floods.
It is “virtually impossible for any person to traverse the city without finding themselves within a school or park zone,” Polk County public defender Eric Gudmundson argued as part of an appeal of a drug-free zone case last year.
Defense lawyers say that Crookston, the second-largest city in the county, also has an unusual abundance of park property. “The city of Crookston has more school and park zones than any other city I’m familiar with,” Ringstrom said.
Shifting priorities
In 2024, Polk County Attorney Widseth told the Grand Forks Herald that he’s simply upholding the laws that are on the books.
“For me, it’s as simple as, if you want to violate the law, don’t do it within those zones,” he said.
But state data suggests a dramatic shift in county authorities’ approach to drug-free zone offenses in the mid-2010s.
Prior to 2016, authorities typically charged between 10 and 20 such offenses each year. But in 2017, the number spiked to over 120 and has remained high ever since, according to data from the Minnesota Judicial Branch.
The timing is notable because in 2016 the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission, which sets sentencing standards across the state, initiated changes that reduced penalties for many minor drug offenses.
Prosecutors in Polk County vehemently opposed those changes.
In a letter to then-Sen. Julie Rosen, R-Fairmont, obtained by the Reformer, assistant county attorney Scott Buhler accused the Sentencing Guidelines Commission of wanting “less drug offenders in prison and more of them left at large in society.”
Buhler also slammed the proposed elimination of some mandatory minimum drug sentences, and called the proposed changes “an attempt to follow the misguided policies of the O’Bama [sic] administration (which I believe are going to have a long-lasting and devastating effect on America in the very near future) of simply releasing thousands of convicted criminals into this nation’s communities.”
The changes, however, were adopted.
The following year, drug-free zone possession charges in Polk County spiked by more than 300%.
Appeals
Defense lawyers have in recent years challenged the legality of Polk County’s drug-free zone enforcement, arguing it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Travelers in Polk County are targeted for drug-free zone enforcement “at much higher rate than similarly situated persons travelling anywhere else in Minnesota,” defense attorney Jessen Alexander wrote in an appeal of a 2021 conviction. “It is impossible to discern any reasonable explanation other than discriminatory enforcement, to explain the disparate treatment between persons travelling in Polk County and persons travelling anywhere else in Minnesota.”
But local courts so far have been unpersuaded. “Neither the U.S. Constitution nor the Minnesota Constitution requires that a Polk County prosecutor share the same charging practice as a Ramsey County prosecutor,” Ninth Judicial District judge Anne Rasmusson, appointed by former Gov. Mark Dayton, wrote in a 2022 ruling.
“If voters disagree with the decisions made by [the county attorney’s] office, they can voice that opinion at the ballot box,” she added.