I saw a local advocacy group tweet out a factoid that I just knew had to be wrong.

It was a right-leaning group called the Minnesota Action Network, and while I am very sympathetic to its causes I thought they had to be gaslighting us.

Yes, I do fact-check my allies when I can. Otherwise, I could wind up repeating things that are excessively “spun” or outright false, and I hate to look stupid by doing so. I make enough stupid mistakes on my own, thank you!

Nope. They weren’t. The comparisons are actually worse than they imply.

Minneapolis’ crime record has surpassed that of Chicago. This is terrifying. We are in a crime crisis and Democrats are more focused on raising taxes to find their radical agenda. #mnleg pic.twitter.com/bwaaAIFEnu

— Minnesota Action Network (@MNActionNetwork) June 18, 2023

There are all sorts of places on the web where you can find crime statistics, so I poked around looking for a place where I could do useful comparisons between all sorts of cities, and with a more useful scale than 1-100. I prefer crimes per unit population because the comparability is easily understood.

For ease of comparison, I lit upon “Areavibes,” which despite the rather silly name has a useful tool that provided just what I needed. The underlying dataset is the same–FBI national crime statistics–while the presentation is very appealing.

So I decided to use the site to compare some cities that are in the news against my own, nationally well-regarded Minneapolis. Minneapolis, after all, retains a good reputation in the country and of course, I live here and have a rather proprietary interest in its success.

What did I learn? Here’s the comparison of Minneapolis to Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, and New York City. You would expect Minneapolis and Portland to be similar, and the other 3 to also be clustered together as bigger and more obviously crime-ridden.

Uh, no.

Minneapolis is off the charts, almost literally, in violent crime. About 30% higher than Chicago, the next most violent city. Portland comes in third, then New York and San Francisco come in last with much less than half the violent crime of Minneapolis.

Yikes! My city is twice as dangerous as New York City. How’s that for a slap in the face?

We have almost 4x times the murder rate of New York City and are worse than Chicago. Rape? Dramatically worse here than elsewhere. Robbery? Ditto. Assault–yep, we’re tops among these cities by a wide margin.

San Francisco does have us beat on property crime, but both cities are way ahead of the pack. Portland and Minneapolis are way ahead of everybody else in car theft too, although Portland has us beat by a mile.

Minneapolis city officials are desperate to get people to come back to the city and in particular the downtown area which has been decimated by the COVID policies they chose to impose on all of us. According to cell phone traffic data, Minneapolis still only has 40% of the foot traffic it did pre-COVID, and that spells doom for the city.

Minneapolis (and in prior years Portland) has enjoyed a reputation as a livable city where the amenities are great, the weather execrable, and the people generally nice. We certainly haven’t been generally seen as a cesspool with violent crime everywhere.

Apparently, it is in fact a violent and dangerous place. That was just punctuated by the fact that the son of a former state representative–one made famous for threatening to burn down a suburb in 2020–just killed 5 innocent young women during a police chase.

WARNING: Disturbing video shows moment of impact from reckless driver speeding & running a red light before killing five people and fleeing the scene. Sources have identified the driver as Derrick John Thompson, the son of former DFL state Rep. John Thompson. pic.twitter.com/JVvNDwuaOV

— Liz Collin (@lizcollin) June 18, 2023

Mr. Thompson had just been released early from prison and was escaping from the police. He exited the freeway at 100 miles an hour and just wiped these girls off the face of the Earth.

This was his father, who was elected to the state legislature after he gave this performance at the home of a Minneapolis police officer in Hugo Minnesota, a suburb of the Twin Cities. NSFW:

Apparently, that gets you elected in my neck of the woods (he represented Saint Paul, across the river).

The response to this latest outrage from the Chair of the Minneapolis Civilian Public Safety Commission which oversees the police (she is also Vice-Chair of our Civil Rights Commission) tells you everything you need to know. It was a tragedy for all concerned, including the driver who killed the 5 immigrant girls who were murdered:

When you defend John Thompson & his son Derek who murdered 5 women, but you can't handle backlash…
You pull out the race card. https://t.co/0jZnSm16g6 pic.twitter.com/oKlMdtDBhn

— MinnesotaMomma (@MommaMinnesota1) June 19, 2023

A man exiting the freeway at almost 100 MPH is not involved in an accident, except in the sense that he didn’t specifically choose to kill those particular people. He killed them because he was a violent felon escaping the police. The 5 women killed were preparing for a wedding.

Imagine if the driver had been the son of a former Republican state legislator who had a history of threatening people in the inner city. The howls of outrage would be everywhere, proving systemic racism. But no, this is a tragic accident. Most of the news stories coming out didn’t even mention that the perpetrator was the son of a controversial former state legislator because the fact was inconvenient.

This is why our crime rate is so high. We are unwilling to confront facts, and one of the facts is that unless you catch and punish criminals they will keep committing crimes. Making excuses for why they commit crimes leads to…more crime and more people justifying it.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is charged with digging this city out of a deep hole, so he and his aides have developed a new ad campaign that tries to debunk all the negative publicity the city has endured of late. Titled “See What All the Fuss is About,” the campaign is trying to convince people that the reputation Minneapolis has developed as crime-ridden is a bunch of fuss and bother about a non-existent problem.

The campaign is titled “See What All the Fuss Is About” which Meet Minneapolis says is a reference to all the negative ‘fussing about Minneapolis’ on social media.

They’re trying to combat a pervasive narrative on social media, with some people believing Minneapolis is an unsafe ‘ghost town’ that doesn’t have anything left to offer.

Unfortunately, the fuss is all about something real–Minneapolis is in fact crime-ridden and dangerous.

Perhaps, though, Mayor Frey can point to a peer city that we do, in fact, surpass in safety: Detroit.

So I suggest a different slogan: “Come to Minneapolis; At least we are not Detroit.”