There has been some discussion about increasing crime in Minneapolis and whether there is a causal relationship between policy and crime rates. Changes in Minneapolis police policy have mostly amounted to rhetoric. The funding cut made to the Police Department last year was less than 1% of the department's budget. Despite this, the rhetoric appears to have had an impact; many officers have left the job apparently due to low morale. The chart below shows the year-over-year difference in the Minneapolis homicide rate for months from January 2020 to May 2021. Crime rates are usually much higher in summer months, but these numbers are year-over-year (for example, the January 2020 data point is the increase from January 2019), so they can be thought of as "seasonally adjusted". The rates are per 100,000 population.
I should also clarify that these are increases in the rate, not percentage increases. The total homicide rate peaked in August 2020 at 4.18. The national murder/nonnegligent manslaughter rate according to the FBI was 5.0 for both 2018 and 2019 (the 2020 numbers are not yet available), but that's an annual rate. The annual rate for Minneapolis was 10.7 in 2019. Based on the numbers I obtained from the City of Minneapolis website, the 2020 rate should be 21.7. This is alarming seeing as it is much higher than any other year in recent history, but to keep things in perspective, the Jackson, Mississippi rate was 46.5 in 2019. Minnesota has the sixth lowest homicide rate in the country, but the geography of Minneapolis makes its crime statistics appear worse than they actually are. A large percentage of the metropolitan population resides in suburbs, thereby skewing the official population of Minneapolis. On the topic of population, the data here is based on the official 2019 and 2020 population estimates, 435,885 and 382,618 respectively. Yes, this suggests that the city's population decreased 12%. This may partly be due to differences in the way the estimates are made. The 2019 estimate is a projection from the 2010 census, while the 2020 number is based on the 2020 census. Still, I think it is reasonable to assume that the pandemic did result in some population decrease in Minneapolis, particularly because of fewer college students residing in the city. For 2021 I used the 2020 population number.
