Crime in the Twin Cities

While the Twin Cities have the reputation as idyllic, peaceful Midwestern towns, the data show that there is more crime in the cities than in comparably sized cities across the country. Incidences of rape are particularly high in the Twin Cities: 64 per 100,000 citizens in St. Paul and 122 per 100,000 in Minneapolis in 2007 compared with 32 per 100,000 in all U.S. cities. For the other measures of crime that were examined-homicides, robberies and property crimes-Minneapolis proves to be particularly prone to criminal activity (it has more of each type of crime per 100,000 than the national average for cities with a population above 250,000) while St. Paul has crime levels about equal to the national statistics for all cities.

The number of homicides has decreased since 1997 in the Twin Cities (as it has nationwide). In the Twin Cities, the number of rapes declined rapidly between 1997 and 2002 and stagnated since 2002. The number of robberies in the Twin Cities declined between 1997 and 2002 but have since spiked. Overall, crime in the United States decreased between 1997 and has since stagnated.

As the number of incidences of rape increased in St. Paul between 2004 and 2007, the geographical pattern of its occurrence was not fundamentally altered. The neighborhoods where it was most common in 2004-the Greater East side, the Dayton's Bluff/Payne-Phalen border, downtown, and the districts to the west of downtown-remained the areas where incidents of rape were clustered in 2007. The difference was that there were progressively more incidents in each of the districts. The neighborhoods of Highland Park, Como Park, West Seventh, St. Anthony Park, and Sunray-Battlecreek had relatively low incidences of rape.

All data comes from FBI's Uniform Crime Reports Database: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm#cius