Crime is the topic where our politics is proudest of not reading the report. One side needs a hellscape; the other needs a mission accomplished. I was a military prosecutor — a base Chief of Justice — and the first rule of that job applies here: you don't get an opinion until you've read the file. So here's the file: Minnesota's own Bureau of Criminal Apprehension data, the cities' year-end numbers, and the federal reports, with every figure sourced.
The violent-crime trend is real, and it's down
Start with the worst number Minnesota has produced this decade: 201 murders in 2021, the modern record. Then the BCA's own annual reports: 182 in 2022, 181 in 2023, 170 in 2024 — three consecutive declines, about 15 percent off the peak. Statewide violent crime overall fell 8.6 percent in 2022, another 6.9 percent in 2023, and held flat in 2024. Larceny hit its lowest count in 56 years.
The cities' 2025 numbers kept the direction. Minneapolis closed 2025 with 64 homicides — down from 77 in 2024 and 96 in 2021 — with gunshot victims down 18 percent and robberies half their 2021 level, per the police department's year-end data. St. Paul's turn is even more striking: 15 homicides in 2025, its lowest total in about a dozen years, and nonfatal shooting injuries down from 181 in 2022 to 73.
Honesty requires the caveats. Rape reports rose 5 percent in 2024 — and nearly 40 percent of victims were minors, a number that should keep legislators up at night. The declines mirror a national trend (a 42-city study found homicide down 17 percent in early 2025), so Minnesota is riding a current, not just steering. And a year with seven mass shootings in Minneapolis, including the Annunciation school shooting, is not a year anyone gets to spike the football. Down is not the same as done.
The carjacking story: what happened when everyone did their job
In 2021 Minnesota recorded 779 carjackings. By 2024: 426 — down about 45 percent — and Minneapolis reported carjackings down 73 percent by 2025. What happened in between is a case study in boring, effective government:
- The Legislature made carjacking a standalone felony in 2023 — Minn. Stat. § 609.247, up to 20 years for first-degree — instead of a robbery footnote.
- Police built dedicated carjacking and auto-theft units.
- And the lawyers went after the root cause. The Kia/Hyundai theft wave — Twin Cities thefts of those cars exploded from 384 in 2021 to 3,293 in 2022 because the manufacturers shipped cars without industry-standard immobilizers — ended in a 35-state settlement forcing free anti-theft hardware, with installation costs to the companies estimated above $500 million. Statewide auto theft fell 19 percent in 2024.
Prosecution, prevention, and corporate accountability, all at once. Nobody had to choose a tribe. It just required people doing their actual jobs.
The uncomfortable numbers: staffing and fraud
Staffing. Minneapolis had roughly 920 sworn officers in early 2019 and bottomed out near 560 in March 2024 — a nearly 40 percent collapse — before the first sustained rebuild since 2019 brought the force back over 600 in 2025, still far below the charter's 731 minimum. Statewide, the BCA counts 10,122 sworn officers — about 1.75 per 1,000 residents — and agencies across Minnesota report shrinking applicant pools. Whatever your politics did with policing debates these past six years, arithmetic doesn't care: you cannot investigate what you cannot staff.
Fraud. Here's the number nobody campaigns on. Add up the BCA's 2024 fraud categories — swindles, card fraud, identity theft, wire fraud and the rest — and you get roughly 18,900 reported offenses: more than all violent crime in Minnesota combined. The clearance rates: 12 percent for swindles, 10 percent for card fraud, 3 percent for wire fraud. Meanwhile the FBI logged $249 million in reported internet-crime losses from Minnesotans in 2025 alone. Fraud is the highest-volume, lowest-consequence crime in the state — and it's the one where the victims most often see nobody charged. The marquee exception proves what's possible: the Feeding Our Future ringleader drew a 500-month federal sentence this spring for a $250 million theft. That case was built by prosecutors who treated paper crime like the violence it does to real lives. The other 18,000 cases deserve the same seriousness.
What demonstrably works
This is the best part of the file: we're not guessing anymore.
- Solve the shootings. St. Paul built a dedicated nonfatal-shooting unit that works every shooting with homicide-level resources. County Attorney John Choi and SPPD credit it for the surge in solved cases — and shootings collapsed. Certainty of consequence deters; the evidence has said so for decades.
- Focused deterrence. Minneapolis's Group Violence Intervention — community moral voice, services, and targeted enforcement aimed at the small network doing most of the shooting — cut gang-shooting victims from 42 to 25 in its first measured window, and the national evidence base is among the strongest in criminology: nine of ten rigorous studies found significant crime declines.
- Fix the product, not just the perp. The Kia/Hyundai settlement shows "public safety" sometimes means suing a manufacturer.
- Clear the courts. Minnesota's judiciary worked its pandemic felony backlog — which had grown 40 percent — back to pre-pandemic levels by May 2024. Justice delayed is deterrence destroyed; that repair mattered.
What we can do
Fund what the evidence supports and demand measurement of everything else. Staff the departments back to strength while holding them to the professional standards Minnesotans were promised. Give fraud — all of it, not just the headline cases — the investigative muscle its victim count deserves. And retire the tribal script: the data shows a state that got safer when prosecutors, police, community interrupters, courts, and yes, consumer-protection lawyers each did their job at the same time.
Neither panic nor propaganda keeps anyone safe. Reading the file does. Minnesota deserves leaders who read the file.
Sources
Minnesota BCA Uniform Crime Reports and press releases for 2022 (Sept. 11, 2023), 2023 (Aug. 15, 2024), and 2024 (Oct. 16, 2025 — report PDF read directly, including the law-enforcement employment and fraud-offense tables; statewide 2025 data is not yet published); Minneapolis Police Department 2025 year-end data as presented by Chief Brian O'Hara (FOX 9, Jan. 6, 2026); MPR News on St. Paul's nonfatal-shooting unit and 2025 declines (Oct. 10, 2025); Star Tribune reporting on 2025 Minneapolis crime amid mass shootings; Minn. Stat. § 609.247 (verified at revisor.mn.gov; enacted 2023); MN Attorney General press release on the 35-state Hyundai/Kia settlement (Dec. 16, 2025) and MPR News coverage; MPD staffing series per Star Tribune/Police1 (May 23, 2025) and City of Minneapolis releases (BCA-reported employment counts differ from MPD's own tallies; each series is cited to its source); Council on Criminal Justice, Mid-Year 2025 crime trends (July 2025); FBI IC3 2025 Internet Crime Report (Minnesota tables); DOJ press release on the Feeding Our Future sentencing (May 22, 2026); MinnPost on Minneapolis GVI results (Nov. 2019); Criminology & Public Policy systematic review of focused deterrence (2025) and RAND Better Policing Toolkit; Minnesota Judicial Branch backlog announcement and Senate Judiciary budget presentation (May 2024; Jan. 22, 2025).
Where sources conflict (e.g., St. Paul's 2024 homicide baseline of 30 vs. 33 across outlets), this article uses the direction both agree on and omits the contested figure. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.