Opinion: Minnesota Somali Americans must confront problems of youth delinquency,violence

Around two months ago, I came across Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher’s statement about Somali youth gang involvement in the Twin Cities and the subsequent reaction from some Somali community leaders criticizing the sheriff. I also read the Sahan Journal article titled “Violence among Somali youth worries community members, law enforcement,” published on July 20, 2026. Because of the issue’s significance and my background working with delinquent Somali American youth, I want to share my perspective with Sahan Journal readers.

The Somali community leaders who criticized Sheriff Fletcher’s remarks have valid arguments, considering the current political climate in which the Somali community in Minnesota endures nearly daily disparagement and denigration from top MAGA politicians and their media echo chamber. This political climate demands that all government and civic leaders in Minnesota and across the nation be culturally sensitive, without minimizing or sugar-coating the genuine problems we face.

However, defending the community from real or perceived disparagement cannot be an excuse for denying, minimizing, or ignoring the real youth delinquency crisis the Somali community in Minnesota is facing. Somali community leaders need to realize and acknowledge that we have severe problems of youth delinquency and gang involvement that are damaging our youth’s prospects and image.

At the same time, Sheriff Fletcher was right to raise the Somali American youth gang involvement issue and bring it to the forefront. As sheriff of Minnesota’s second-most populous county, with a large Somali population, he is responsible, along with other law enforcement agencies, for educating the public about criminal activity in their neighborhoods. 

That said, Sheriff Fletcher should have enlisted the Somali community’s civic and political leaders to address the problem by holding roundtable discussions and obtaining their input before making his public statements. This approach would have highlighted the issue and spared him much criticism simultaneously.

Before I offer my recommendations and next steps, let me put the Somali American youth delinquency issue into proper perspective. From 2012 to 2018, I worked for one of the largest mental health and behavioral health service providers in central Ohio. We had outpatient and residential facilities, foster care, school-based programs, family therapy, and a nonpublic charter school. 

I worked for the Somali Outreach Program, focusing on Somali American delinquent youth ages 13 to 17. I acquired significant insight into the behavior of delinquent individuals. I witnessed the agony their parents experienced and how the gang involvement process unfolded. My work involved collaborating with school districts, juvenile courts, clinicians, parents, law enforcement outreach departments, houses of worship, and other organizations to support and advocate for our clients.

This is not scientific data but anecdotal evidence and my personal observations dealing with Somali American delinquent youth, their families, and community responses. Although Columbus, Ohio, is geographically and functionally different from the Twin Cities, I continue to observe similar patterns since I moved to Minnesota in the summer of 2022 because the underlying causes and effects are the same.

The delinquent youth are predominantly males born in the U.S. or who came to the U.S. as toddlers. They are relatively few, but in large enough numbers to be noticeable in the neighborhoods. The delinquency rate and crime involvement rate among older Somali immigrant males were very minimal. Likewise, the delinquency rate and crime involvement rate among females, whether they were born locally or abroad, were very low. 

These young men take their cultural cues from other American youth. The way they talk, socialize, dress, and plan their daily routines is very similar to that of other delinquent innercity youth. Of course, they are ethnically Somali, but calling them Somalis will only perpetuate the identity crisis they are already experiencing. Nothing about their conduct reflects Somali culture unless they are trying to appease their immigrant parents.

Regarding how young Somali American men became delinquent and involved in criminal behavior, let me take you back to the early 1990s, when the first batch of Somali refugees arrived in the U.S. Because of their economic situation, many of these families settled in inner-city, high-crime neighborhoods and often in low-income housing projects. Therefore, from the start, Somali children had exposure to gang activity, drugs, crime, and other dangers through their American acquaintances and neighbors.

In Columbus, Ohio, for example, the first arrivals settled in the Northland and North Linden neighborhoods around the Cleveland Avenue and Morse Road corridor, a historically high-crime neighborhood. In Minneapolis, it is south Minneapolis, particularly the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood and the surrounding Lake Street neighborhoods.

Let me use Capital Park Apartments in Columbus, Ohio, in the historically high-crime North Linden neighborhood, as an example. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, robberies against Somali women were so widespread that the men created a block watch group to protect the women at night. U.S.-born peers bullied and beat up the newly arrived Somali children at school and on school buses. Eventually, enough young Somali men who grew up in that same neighborhood formed their own self-defense groups and started fighting back. 

As a result, there were many group fights between Somali youth and U.S.-born youth at schools and in the neighborhoods. For a while, they were street fighters or neighborhood vigilantes, whichever you want to call them, and drove out Capital Park’s U.S.-born rivals. As a result, the apartment residents became predominantly Somali. Within a few years, they started doing exactly what their American-born predecessors used to do: robbing other Somalis, terrorizing the neighborhood, and forming their own gangs. 

These young men started life in high-crime neighborhoods in the U.S.; by the time their parents moved up the economic ladder and moved to the suburbs, it was too late. They had enough negative friends already that they either continued their criminal activity in the suburbs, or they went back to their original crime-infested neighborhoods. 

Unfortunately, this is the life cycle of many Somali gang members and other delinquent youths, which then is perpetuated through negative peer pressure, affecting other Somali American youth. Although high-crime neighborhood housing is the genesis of how Somali American youth first engaged in criminal activities, I also identified other cascading causes from my delinquent youth clients, such as lack of parental supervision, identity crisis, and educational failure.

The fundamental question is what lures some Somali American youth to gangs and other criminal behavior. The undeniable short answer, in my experience, is negative peer pressure. Somali American youth males hang out together and create social networks, either negative or positive, exacerbated by the social isolation they feel from the broader Somali immigrant community and non-Somali Americans. 

These social networks, amplified by social media, bring together both individuals looking for social acceptance and those with ill intentions. Their recruitment methods do not differ from those of other non-Somali gangs. They look for young, isolated and vulnerable men seeking a sense of belonging and promise them protection, community and status. They also resort to coercion and intimidation when it serves their purpose.  

Going forward, we need to shift from theoretical posturing to real problem-solving. We must confront the long-term and short-term consequences of our youth falling into gangs, crime, and other delinquencies. 

Law enforcement agencies and Somali community leaders should come together, collaborate, and propose solutions instead of discussing the problem in the abstract. We need to enlist parents, law enforcement agencies, civic leaders, houses of worship, school districts, and relevant elected officials in Minnesota at the local and state levels to develop solutions. 

Somali leaders need to understand that it is our duty to help our youth; yet we cannot do so when we have an adversarial relationship with law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement agencies need to realize that they cannot solve this problem alone and need to develop an amicable relationship with the Somali community to achieve a better outcome. 

Lastly, I would like to recommend five steps to mitigate the Somali American youth delinquency problem in Minnesota:

1. Appoint a Somali/East African public safety task force to study the problem and propose solutions to the community at large, elected officials, and law enforcement agencies.
2. Develop youth delinquency prevention programs targeting Somali American youth. The program focuses on six main areas of concern: clinical treatment referrals; education attainment and school dropout prevention; gang involvement and negative peer pressure education and awareness; street-smart drug education and awareness; positive role modeling and mentoring; and parent education, including parenting classes.
3. Enhance relations between the Somali community and law enforcement by hosting discussions and broadening law enforcement citizens academy training to include more Somali community leaders and activists.
4. Add Somali Culture 101 training to the curriculum of both new police cadets and Crisis Intervention Team training.
5. Aim to increase the number of Somali American law enforcement and criminal justice system professionals in Minnesota to act as a bridge between the community and law enforcement.

Let us all act with precision and speed. If we don’t, the alternative is unsafe neighborhoods and our youth shooting each other at culturally and religiously sacred places like school graduations, Eid celebrations, malls and even weddings.

The post Opinion: Minnesota Somali Americans must confront problems of youth delinquency,violence appeared first on Sahan Journal.

Originally reported by Sahan Journal by Mahdi Warsama. Read the full story at the source.