Minnesota’s progressive leadership and their public safety policy failures
It’s said a picture tells a thousand words. Charting Minnesota’s violent crime rate vs. imprisonment rate tells us a lot about the effect progressive leadership has had on these important public safety benchmarks.
In the ten years before Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison took office, Minnesota’s violent crime rate hovered just below 250/100,000, and the imprisonment rate hovered just below 200/100,000. While lower, the imprisonment rate generally mirrored the violent crime rate throughout the decade.
Then in 2019, Walz and Ellison took office supporting progressive criminal justice reform, and Minnesota began seeing dramatic changes in both violent crime rates and imprisonment rates. It’s important to note that these changes began happening in Minnesota nearly two years before the world had ever heard the name George Floyd, and these changes were in direct conflict with the national averages.
In the first three years of Walz and Ellison’s public safety leadership (2019-2021) Minnesota’s violent crime rate (murder, aggravated assault, robbery, and rape) increased 40%, while the imprisonment rate plummeted 26%. To this date, Minnesota’s violent crime rate remains 12% higher than when Walz and Ellison were elected into office, and the imprisonment rate remains 20% lower.
Sources: MN Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s Crime Data Explorer and UCR reports, MN Department of Corrections Population Reports, and Minnesota’s population as reported by World Population Review.
Comparing Minnesota’s imprisonment rate to the neighboring states of North and South Dakota, Iowa, and Wisconsin is also telling. In 2022, as Minnesota grappled with unacceptable levels of violent crime, it also remained stubbornly among the lowest imprisonment rates in the nation. That same year, our neighboring states held imprisonment rates that were 75% higher than Minnesota, per data from The Sentencing Project.
After three years of deteriorating public safety following the “uprising” of 2020, it would have made sense for Minnesota’s political leadership to take action to address violence through the creation of more swift and certain consequences for violent offenders. Instead, the “trifecta” of a progressive led House, Senate, and Governor passed into law multiple “reform” minded public safety measures which placed more emphasis on the effect the laws would have on criminals than the effect the criminals’ actions would have on innocent victims.
Some of these reform minded initiatives included:
- The creation of the Office of Restorative Practices, the Clemency Review Commission, and the Attorney General’s Office’s Conviction Review Unit
- Automatic expungements of criminal convictions
- Felony murder resentencing
- Prosecutor initiated sentencing review
- Supervision (probation) abatement
- Prison related early release incentive program
We wrote in detail of these extrajudicial efforts to reduce consequences for criminal offending in our 2024 winter edition of Thinking Minnesota — find the article here.
These progressive efforts were also summed up well by the Minnesota Reformer, which published an article in June 2023 concluding the legislation was likely to “result in scores of people being released from prison sooner; shorter terms of probation or community supervision; erasure of some aiding and abetting felony convictions and reduction in sentences of others; and easier expungement of certain non-violent crimes.”
Minnesota’s public safety landscape has been damaged in recent years by progressive policies which have consistently ignored policies with a proven track record of reducing crime — policies that provide for swift, certain, and consequential enforcement of our laws.