Sahan Journal15%
Violence among Somali youth worry community members, law enforcement 62%
By Mohamed Ibrahim25%
7/20/2026, 8:36:08 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Ambiguity (Equivocation), and Availability Heuristic, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 27.9% saturation with 307 hits. Analysis detected 3,076 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,102 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 57.9% and a BS Rank of 62% (7,300 of 18,982 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 61.50% of the article peer group.
Amid a recent rise in violence among Somali youth, Omar Jamal has had to increase his outreach efforts.
Earlier this month, Jamal, who heads the East African engagement unit for the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office, met with several parents, including a Somali mother who has lost two children to gun violence.
“It is getting out of hand,” Jamal told Sahan Journal.
“I think it’s about time the community takes this issue very seriously and tries to see if there’s anything that can be done.”
In an effort to address the uptick in violence, Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher, Jamal and other sheriff’s office authorities will be holding a 6 p.m. community meeting on Tuesday at their Arden Hills patrol station on 1411 Paul Kirkwall Drive.
During an episode of his livestream show Live on Patrol earlier this month, Fletcher connected shootings near the Quarry Shopping Center in northeast Minneapolis during the Fourth of July weekend to a dispute between what he called Somali gangs.
The sheriff said 300 Somali youths, some of them belonging to these gangs, gathered at a juice shop in Arden Hills hours before making their way southwest to Minneapolis and shooting at each other.
Many within the Somali community were outraged at Fletcher’s comments, which they say exacerbates an already fraught environment of politically fueled and hateful rhetoric against the community on social media.
However, others are calling the response a distraction, and plead for focus on solutions to the violence at hand.
Are they gangs, or not?
Ramsey County Sheriff’s Deputy and gang investigator Ben Seidl described 12 gangs made up of Somali youth, the largest of which is based in Minneapolis while the others are spread across Twin Cities suburbs like Burnsville and Eden Prairie.
Traditional gangs, like “Family Mob” or “G Block,” who had 25 of their members indicted last month for trafficking fentanyl in south Minneapolis, are made up of large groups that commit crimes for the benefit or at the direction of the larger group.
The groups made up of Somali youth are much different from how gangs typically operate, Seidl said.
“What’s different about Somali gangs from other gangs is that most of them are not involved in selling narcotics — it’s more about bragging rights and just ego,” Seidl said during Fletcher’s livestream.
“From what I’ve seen, there’s really no monetary gain out of this stuff.”
Seidl said the other big difference is intentionally high-profile shootings.
He cited several incidents outside of high school graduations and the Minnesota State Fair, including a 2023 shooting at the Washburn High School graduation ceremony he said ignited a long-running feud between the Minneapolis gang and several suburb gangs.
According to the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office, there have been 14 homicides and more than 100 shootings in the last two years linked to the groups identified by investigators.
Jamal, who has been with the sheriff’s office for more than five years, said he’s learned from his interactions with parents and their children that the shootings typically result from petty disagreements.
“It’s over nothing,” he said.
“When you really look at it, you wonder the reasons behind why they kill each other.”
Burnsville Police Department spokesman Paul Omodt acknowledged gang activity is a concern for the department, but did not specify Somali youth or otherwise.
Omodt told Sahan Journal that the department works with other Dakota County law enforcement agencies to address the issue.
“Our department’s focus is on the people committing crimes and the behaviors that put our community at risk,” Omodt said.
“We also know that keeping a community safe is about more than enforcement.
We spend a great deal of time building relationships with our community through partnerships with schools, Dakota County, community organizations, businesses, and residents.”
Public issue should be private
Somali leaders at a news conference Tuesday denounced Fletcher’s comments, calling them an exacerbation of what is already a fraught time for the Somali community.
Following the indictments of some Somali offenders for Medicaid fraud, President Donald Trump used the issue to justify Operation Metro Surge, the largest immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history.
The president’s supporters continue to aim hateful rhetoric at the entire community, and the highlighting of Somali gangs over gang activity in other communities in Minnesota fuels that behavior, they said.
“We need to tone down the language of condemnation and of singling out.
It doesn’t help anybody,” said Ali Gaashaan, executive director of Volunteers of Somalia.
“It doesn’t help with the solution, it doesn’t make the state safer and it doesn’t help Somali parents and their kids who want to take a different path.”
They didn’t deny the existence of youth violence as a problem in the community, but instead Fletcher’s choice to discuss the issue publicly on a livestream without engaging the community adds fuel to the deluge of hateful rhetoric being directed at the community, they said.
In a statement following the community’s response, Fletcher said his concern is focused on helping the 300 or so Somali youth involved in gang activity, and that he welcomes the community’s input toward that goal.
“My 40 years of experience in addressing gang violence in our community has taught me that we need a three pronged approach of prevention, intervention, and enforcement to impact the issue,” Fletcher said.
“This is about saving lives.
I am thankful the conversation has begun.”
Despite the distaste of Fletcher’s comments by some, even more community members are discussing the issue of youth violence, said Abdirizak Bihi, an activist and radio host based in the predominantly East African neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside in Minneapolis.
“We are seeing a lot of people talking about it in coffee shops, at community gatherings,” Bihi said.
“We’ll hear that last night there was a shooting and there was a young man who died, or we are hearing about a young girl that got hurt.”
He said the increased violence has been met with increased action by community youth organizations, such as the Hoops4Unity youth basketball league.
But the issue persists, and Bihi, who is a parent himself, said Fletcher’s comments about gangs sparked an interest in him and other parents because facts about why the violence is happening are so scarce.
“He’s the law enforcement and we are not, so we can have concerns but we need the facts, and we definitely need to engage all of us together,” he said.
“The most important thing that we all want is to save young people, those who are dying and those who are being incarcerated.
We don’t want that.”
Analysis
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