The numbers game
Is crime down in Minneapolis?
On June 10, 2024, the FBI released its Quarterly Uniform Crime Report (UCR) covering January through March 2024. The report compared the first quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of 2023. On its face, the data offers encouraging news in the form of a 15 percent drop in violent crime nationally.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland took the opportunity to issue a press release on June 10 touting the news and crediting, in part, the “evidence-based community violence intervention initiatives that save lives.”
A cursory overview might assuage the casual observer, but what does a more comprehensive look at the data reveal about recovery in Minneapolis?
While any drop in crime is encouraging, and there are signs that crime is subsiding from its historic surge in 2020, the year-to-year comparison represents weak analysis, and the conclusions drawn don’t ring true for many communities throughout the nation, particularly those with progressive leadership.
The FBI report is missing data from 5,549 law enforcement agencies across the country — including Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and Indianapolis, among many others. To be fair, the FBI did account for this by only comparing data from agencies that supplied data in both time frames, but the fact that nearly 30 percent of the nation’s law enforcement data isn’t included significantly calls into question any firmly drawn conclusions.
Additionally, examination of the data offers sobering news as violent crime rises in some of the nation’s progressive cities, such as Seattle (nine percent) and Denver (three percent) — with Minneapolis (14 percent) and St. Paul (two percent) up amid the reported nationwide 15 percent decrease in violent crime.
These increases prompted a more substantive examination of how Minneapolis, and the city’s Third Precinct in particular, were “recovering” by comparing data from the first six months (through June 12) of 2019 against the same period in 2024 using the Minneapolis Legacy Crime Dashboard.
The data is complete for both time periods and, therefore, more valuable than the reported nationwide data. Comparing 2024 to a pre-civil unrest and pre-pandemic year also offers a “norm” with which to more accurately gauge any actual trend. The data is compelling and illustrates what far too many people already know from personal experience with violent, and often random, crime: Minneapolis is not recovering.
Anecdotal examples of the city’s struggles over a few days this spring include a shooting and stabbing at one of the city’s homeless encampments, the burial of Minneapolis police officer Jamal Mitchell, who was shot and killed in the line of duty, the carjacking of a woman in broad daylight along Lagoon Avenue adjacent to Bde Maka Ska, and the shooting of a 21-year-old on the University of Minnesota campus.
If the data cements these anecdotal stories together, what does it tell us?
Minneapolis has fallen short of the rosy portrait painted by sweeping brushstrokes in national press releases.
In 2024, violent crime in Minneapolis remains 29 percent above that of 2019. Individually aggravated assaults remain up 32 percent, robberies are up 54 percent, and murder is up 114 percent over “the good old days” of five years earlier.
The lack of recovery in Minneapolis’ Third Precinct has been even worse. Violent crime remains up 36 percent over 2019, aggravated assaults remain up 26 percent, robberies are up 84 percent, and murders are up 200 percent over 2019.
These numbers shouldn’t come as a surprise to the residents of the area, who have lived with a burned-out and vacant police station for four years, a light rail station that sees daily drug overdoses, a main thoroughfare blighted by vacant businesses and homeless encampments, and an intersection which the city has all but handed over to activists, called George Floyd Square.
Minneapolitans should reject the call to accept the “new normal,” especially when a “2019 normal” is still within reach.