Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Uniform Crime Report

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) has just released the Uniform Crime Reports for 2018. The report is the compilation of data submitted to the BCA by the state’s law enforcement agencies. It contains the types of crimes, number of crimes, ages of victims, ages of suspect, and even the types of weapons used.

It is very tempting to compare the data to the previous year, but I find value in watching how the data is trending over a series of years. Reading the report is chance to increase situational awareness and look at what the statistics indicate about Minnesota’s law enforcement efforts.

  • The report shows there were 104 murders in 2018, which is down from 114 in 2017. A five-year look shows the number fluctuates—with 82 in 2014, 130 in 2015, and 100 in 2014. Robberies and aggravated assaults were down compared to 2017, but rapes were up 9%.

  • The number of people arrested appears to be steady with past years’ numbers: 105,329 men and 42,914 women were arrested in 2018. Arrests for meth, opioids, heroin, and cocaine were up—but the number of arrests for marijuana was down from 9,495 in 2017 to 8,752 in 2018. The five-year high for marijuana arrests was 11,590 in 2014.

  • In the category of “Law Enforcement Officers Killed or Assaulted,” the data indicated 487 officers were assaulted in 416 incidents. The most frequent activity for assault was responding to disturbance calls (161), followed by handling prisoners (107). There were no officers killed in 2018.

  • On page 50 of the report are the links to crime rate information that presents an agency-by-agency breakout of the jurisdiction crime rates and the percent of cases the agency has cleared.

The link to the data can be found on the BCA’s Criminal Justice Data Reporting section of their website.

Up next: Force Science: Realistic De-escalation Training is coming to Minnesota in September

Stay safe,
Rob

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