Minnesota Governor Tim Walz will be the country’s next vice president if the Democrats win the upcoming election, but what is his state’s crime rate and how does it compare to others?
Walz, who has been selected as Kamala Harris’ running mate, is seen as a progressive and his record on crime has been criticized by Republicans, with Minnesota-based conservative think tank American Experiment calling the state a new “high crime state.”
Minnesota is roughly in the middle when it comes to safety, ranked 29th in a list of the most dangerous states in the U.S. compiled by Forbes Advisor in March.
Using 2022 figures from the FBI Crime Data Explorer, Forbes calculated a 2.81 violent crime rate per 1,000 residents in the state, with a one in 356 chance of being a victim of a violent crime.
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This is significantly better than New Mexico, the most dangerous state, which had a violent crime rate of 7.80, but well over the 1.26 rate in the safest state, New Hampshire.
It has a better violent crime rate per 1,000 residents than most of the states surrounding it—Wisconsin (2.97), South Dakota (3.77) and Iowa (2.87). North Dakota is just slightly under Minnesota with a rate of 2.80.
But Minnesota’s crime rates have increased for several years in a row since Walz was elected governor in 2018.
Newsweek has contacted Walz via email for comment.
Last year, local news outlet MinnPost reported that after the violent crime rate dropped in 2018 and 2019, it increased by 17.2 percent in 2020 and 21.6 percent in 2021. This was based on the Minnesota Department of Public Safety’s 2021 statewide crime report.
This was discussed on the Minnesota Now with Cathy Wurzer podcast, where Senior Fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice Thomas Abt said the spike in certain crimes was generally in line with the rest of the country.
He also stressed that the pandemic will have had a big impact, as it put “institutions that are responsible for engaging those [criminals]—cops, courts, corrections, community-based organizations, and others—it placed all of those institutions under tremendous strain.”
Another major player was the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police, which sparked mass riots in the state and across the country.
“There was a nationwide significant spike in violence in 2020 immediately after that event. And rates have increased ever since,” Abt said.
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Walz’s Republican counterpart, JD Vance, has already jumped on Walz’s handling of the situation. Speaking about the riots that began in Minnesota over Floyd’s death—which happened while he was being arrested in Minneapolis—Vance told Fox News: “If we remember the rioting in the summer of 2020, Tim Walz was the guy who let rioters burn down Minneapolis.”
“And then Kamala Harris was the one who bailed the rioters out of jail,” Vance added.
At the time, Walz was accused of waiting too long to activate the state’s National Guard to respond to protests.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and then-Police Chief Medaria Arradondo reportedly asked the governor for a Guard deployment on May 27, two days after Floyd’s murder.
In an August 2020 interview, Frey told the Minneapolis Star Tribune: “We expressed the seriousness of the situation. The urgency was clear. He [Walz] did not say yes…He said he would consider it.”
Walz gave the green light for a Guard deploy the following afternoon, after a Minneapolis Police Department precinct had already been burnt down that day.
Walz’s office told the Minneapolis Star Tribune at the time: “As a 24-year veteran of the Minnesota National Guard, Governor Walz knows how much planning goes into a successful mission.
“That’s why he pushed the City of Minneapolis for details and a strategy. He ordered the Minnesota National Guard to start preparing Thursday morning which allowed them to deploy to both St. Paul and Minneapolis that evening, per the Mayors’ requests.”
