One of the lessons I taught my kids is that nothing good happens after midnight. My unscientific guess is that becomes even more certain as one approaches 4 am. One of the more troubling public safety stories of the week bore that out early Tuesday morning in Minneapolis.
At 4:12 am, seven (7) teens in a stolen Hyundai Elantra, driven by a 15-year-old, slammed into a semi-truck that had just exited I-35W at SE 4th Street, near the campus of the University of Minnesota. Three of the teens died at the scene and four others were seriously injured. All ranged in age from 15-19 years old.
These teens should have been home asleep on a school night. Yet these seven were reportedly fleeing the scene of a shooting that occurred just minutes before the crash. The car was also reportedly stolen outside a residence in the Como neighborhood about an hour before the crash – the second night in a row someone had tried to steal the car.
Why would a group of kids have the impression that running around all night stealing cars and getting into shootouts was acceptable? Because in Minneapolis the message sent by far too many leaders has been clear for years now: enforcement and consequences are the problem – not criminal behavior.
The Minneapolis auto-theft problem
The number of auto thefts across the state is dominated by the number occurring in just one city – Minneapolis – and the concentration has gotten dramatically worse over time.
Here are a few data points extracted from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s Crime Data Explorer, that help paint the picture:
- In 2021, Minneapolis represented 29% of all auto thefts in the state. By 2025 that percentage had grown to 51%.
- In 2025, auto-thefts in Minneapolis remained 15% higher than in 2021, while auto-thefts in the rest of the state had dropped by 54%.
- In 2021, the rest of the state recorded more than twice as many auto-thefts as were reported in Minneapolis – 10,563 to 4,327.
- In every year since 2023, the number of auto-thefts in Minneapolis has exceeded the total number of auto-thefts throughout the rest of the state.
- Between 2023 (the year Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced her “Youth Auto-Theft Early Intervention Initiative”) and 2025, there were 19,497 auto-theft in Minneapolis, and 18,500 throughout the rest of the state.
- Through the first six months of 2026, auto-theft reports in Minneapolis have risen by 22.4% over the same period in 2025.
The takeaway
The permissive and excuse ridden policies that have been championed in Minneapolis have been disastrous not just to the city, but to the very people such policies have been installed to help.
When Minneapolis progressive leaders stop championing diversion programs for offenders, and start focusing on enforcement of law and order and ensuring swift and certain consequences for offenders, the city will begin to see a shift in behavior.
That would benefit not only Minneapolitans, but all Minnesotans.