The Star Tribune’s Essential Minnesota newsletter of February 18 flagged the paper’s “5 takeaways” from 2024 crime trends in the Twin Cities. Reporter Zoë Jackson summarized the linked story in the newsletter:
Our long-awaited annual crime trend breakdown is here.
Every year, we analyze crime data in Minneapolis and St. Paul and compare our local stats to national numbers. Last year was a bit of a mixed bag in the Twin Cities.
For some background, homicide and other serious crime in the U.S. rose sharply in 2020 during the pandemic and racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd.
Nationally, numbers show that nearly all categories of crime fell last year, with homicide returning to pre-pandemic rates.
A Star Tribune analysis of local crime data showed St. Paul continued seeing drops in most major crime categories. But Minneapolis saw some violence metrics increase, ending a two-year streak of declines.
Officials have expected Minneapolis to face more hurdles to reach lower levels of crime as the city recovers from Floyd’s murder and struggles with instability in its police ranks and violence interruption programs.
Read more of our findings here.
Jeffrey Anderson is president of the American Main Street Initiative and former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the Department of Justice from 2017 to 2021. He writes frequently for City Journal (see his columns here) and the Claremont Review of Books (see his essays here). I forwarded the newsletter and asked Jeff if he would be willing to take a look at the Star Tribune’s “takeaways.” Jeff’s comment draws on quotes from a certain spineless weasel who nominally leads the Minneapolis Police Department:
The Star Tribune’s “long-awaited” (its own words) “annual crime trend breakdown” is long on excuses and short on providing any kind of reckoning for the city’s crime explosion in recent years.
“Preliminary data from across the country indicates violence and other crime is sliding back toward pre-pandemic levels,” the Star Tribune writes. “But in the Twin Cities, the full violent crime picture is more complicated.”
Actually, it’s not complicated; it’s a straightforward failure. Minneapolis had more murders in 2024 than in 2023, and its murder rate in 2024 was about two-and-a-half-times as high as in 2018 (about 18 percent versus 7.2 percent). That’s an extraordinary increase in the murder rate over just six years.
The Star Tribune attempts to provide “context” for this. It writes, “Criminologists and local officials have cautioned that the road to pre-pandemic crime rates may have more obstacles in Minneapolis, the ground zero for a global racial reckoning after [George] Floyd’s murder and a city that has struggled with instability in its police ranks and violence interruption programs.”
Translation: Minneapolis is far more infested with radical leftism than most places are, so its crime rates can’t be expected to fall even if rates fall elsewhere.
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara provided one statistic to the Star Tribune that goes a long way toward explaining the city’s huge murder spike: “We’ve got to remember this police department was typically 900 police officers, and we’ve lost over 500 police officers since 2020.” Those cops left, of course, because the city’s leadership turned on them.
Here’s another interesting tidbit from the police chief: “O’Hara said the murder increase could partly be explained by a rise in fatal shootings around homeless encampments, which he said almost doubled last year to 15.”
This is further evidence that Minneapolis has essentially adopted the opposite of the “broken windows” policing policy that did so much to reduce crime and increase livability in New York City in the 1990s. In doing so, it has rather predictably produced opposite results from those that the Big Apple enjoyed.
I posted Jeff’s related comments on the pending Minneapolis Police Department consent decree in Note 1 and Note 3 of my series of posts on it.
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