However tallied, Minneapolis crime is up

The FBI released data Monday indicating that violent crime surged 35.5 percent in Minneapolis last year, but the city's Police Department said a computer glitch grossly exaggerated what was actually a 15 percent jump from 2004.

A 15 percent increase is still six times the 2.5 percent national rise in murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults in 2005, figures disclosed in preliminary data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. Still, the volume of violent crime in Minneapolis is about 30 percent below levels in the mid-1990s, when the number of annual murders nearly hit triple digits.

The nationwide increase in violent crime reversed a five-year downward trend, but these crimes are more than 25 percent below the numbers reported in 1992, the start of a years-long decline.

On the downside, violent crime in Minneapolis has increased in every year since 2001. And the data come as the city has grappled with two high-profile homicides in the Downtown and Uptown areas, spreading anxiety among some residents and leaders.

Alfred Blumstein, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who specializes in criminology, said the data "raise a concern about whether we're seeing a turn up in the crime rate," but it's too early to draw meaningful conclusions.

Blumstein said crime increases could be fueled by cutbacks in social services, a diversion of police to fighting terrorism, reductions in police manpower, declining job opportunities for teenagers and the release of 600,000 convicts from prison this year.

The FBI report relies on data reported by 12,000 law enforcement agencies.

A 35.5 percent increase in violent crime in Minneapolis would have marked the biggest rise among U.S. cities with populations in the range of 350,000 to 400,000. Interim Police Chief Tim Dolan attributed that error to a tight FBI reporting deadline that did not leave time for a department analyst to cross-check the data.

"Obviously we had some sort of computer glitch when we ran the numbers, and we are working to correct that," Dolan said. "Unfortunately, we made a mistake."

The Police Department said the surge in violent crime in Minneapolis resulted largely from a 15 percent rise in robberies and a 19 percent jump in aggravated assaults. No raw numbers were made public.

Murders fall in Minneapolis

Minneapolis' single bright spot in the report was an 11.3 percent drop in murders, from 53 in 2004 to 47 last year, while law enforcement agencies across the country reported an average 4.8 percent rise, to a total of more than 16,900 homicide victims.

Murders rose 76 percent in Birmingham, Ala., 51 percent in St. Louis, 42 percent in Kansas City, Mo., and about 40 percent in Milwaukee.

Despite a national property crime decrease of 1.6 percent, the FBI reported that Minneapolis property crime surged by 11.9 percent over 2004, including an 18 percent rise in burglaries. It was unclear whether the department will seek to revise those figures as well.

An FBI spokeswoman said she expects the bureau to accept Minneapolis' revisions.

Minneapolis' surge helped drive up violent crime in the Midwest by 5.7 percent, the steepest increase of any region. Several other Midwestern cities also reported sizable increases in violent offenses: Milwaukee's incidence rose by 32.5 percent and Detroit's by 31.6 percent.

Robberies rose by 4.5 percent nationally and aggravated assaults increased by 1.9 percent, but the number of rapes declined by 1.9 percent.

The scene in St. Paul

In contrast, violent crime in St. Paul in 2005 rose by a modest 1.5 percent, though the number of murders increased 20 percent, from 20 to 24. Property crimes in St. Paul were 5 percent above 2004.

St. Paul Police Chief John Harrington said that he learned a long time ago not to get too caught up in the numbers. He was taught, he said, that someone willing to take too much credit in the good times will have to take blame when the numbers aren't favorable.

"The community's sense of their well-being and their safety is probably a better indicator of how safe a city is," Harrington said.

St. Paul Council Member Dan Bostrom, a former police officer, said he's confident that Minneapolis officials are addressing the crime issues and worries that St. Paul could pay for their success.

"People that do these crimes," Bostrom said, "will go where there is the least resistance."

Dolan said comparisons with St. Paul aren't fair, because Minneapolis has more economic disparity and greater problems involving juveniles, with the highest ratio of high school dropouts in the state. Gang members also have become younger and more violent, and gangs have become more fragmented, he said. The resulting unequal access to the drug market has forced more gangs to turn to robbery for revenue, Dolan said.

Centralizing the department's juvenile unit is a key strategy to tackle the youth crimes. Department officials hope the eight-officer unit will increase the number of investigations of juvenile crime, which shrank when the unit disappeared three years ago, Dolan said.

Resources are stretched to the limit, Dolan said, because of funding cuts over the past two years, but he said a bigger factor may be the department's failure to move quickly enough to implement crime-fighting strategies in the past year.

A daily battle on the streets

Police introduced the STOP unit -- a 50-officer team that responds to crime hot spots around the city -- last year to combat violent crime and move officers throughout the city as crime necessitated.

Shortly after 8 p.m. Monday, STOP officers Brandon Kitzerow and Jeff Kading responded to a call of "shots fired" on Oliver Avenue N. at the corner of the highly traveled Golden Valley Road.

"He shot me! He shot me!" the man on the ground was yelling, referring to the man sitting on him.

Kitzerow arrested the suspect, and Kading tended to the victim, whose white T-shirt was covered in blood. The officers shooed away kids on bicycles who happened by.

Earlier, two other STOP unit officers patrolled known drug spots and busted a man with marijuana and ticketed a driver with a suspended license.

Staff writer Chao Xiong contributed to this report. Greg Gordon is a correspondent in the Star Tribune Washington Bureau. dchanen@startribune.com • 612-673-4465 hpadilla@startribune.com • 651-298-1551