North Minneapolis records a decade low in shootings

Minneapolis' North Side, long plagued with the city’s highest rates of gunfire, is experiencing a decade low in shootings as other violent crime trends stabilize post-COVID.

In 2024, the enclave recorded 35 fewer gunshot victims than the prior year, a 21% reduction that returned the community to pre-pandemic levels, police data shows.

The North Side, which contains some of the city’s most historically disenfranchised neighborhoods, also observed a dramatic decline in Shotspotter activations and reports of automatic gunfire last year.

Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara lauded the development in a news conference on Thursday, crediting state and federal partners for helping local police drive down violence.

“For years, even decades, I’ve heard people say that the North Side isn’t safe,” said Frey. That longtime perception is no longer true, he said: “We’re coming here right now to correct the record.”

Progress can be felt on major thoroughfares, such as West Broadway and Lowry Avenue, and is markedly improving the lives of residents formerly subjected to the daily sound of gunshots on their blocks, he said.

O’Hara pointed to the striking change at one of the city’s most dangerous intersections: W. Broadway and N. Lyndale Avenue. Home to the former Merwin Liquors store and a Winner Gas station known as the “murder station,” the corner had earned a grim reputation. In 2021, an estimated 38 people were shot in the vicinity, O’Hara said.

By 2024, after a push by fed-up neighbors and an investigation by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, only one person was struck by gunfire in the area all year.

“This isn’t something that changed last week or last month,” O’Hara said.

He applauded community members for reclaiming those public spaces by letting troublemakers know “they’re not going to take it anymore.”

O’Hara tied much of the improvement to a series of federal racketeering indictments by the former U.S. Attorney, who jailed dozens of men associated with Minneapolis’ most prominent street gangs.

“Residents have been telling me it’s gotten quieter here,” O’Hara added. “The police officers have noticed it.”

Minneapolis homicide rates slightly increased in 2024 after declining from 2021’s bloody peaks. But overall gun violence has generally plummeted, down 9% last year and falling nearly by half since 2021 — a decrease driven largely by a 57% drop in shootings across north Minneapolis neighborhoods, according to a Minnesota Star Tribune analysis.

Of the eight homicides logged this year, just three occurred in the city’s Fourth Precinct. (Those figures include justified, or self-defense, killings.)

That is indicative of the North Side’s extended reprieve.

North Minneapolis had the most room for violence to drop after shootings in those communities helped drive the city’s explosion of generational bloodshed after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Last year’s roughly 130 shootings on the North Side were below the pre-pandemic average going back to 2008.

In 2021, the North Side had 300 shootings — nearly half of the city’s total. Some of that violence shifted south, including to the Whittier and Phillips neighborhoods.

Police Department leaders noted a seven-day stretch in January and another in February when no one was shot anywhere in the city — a phenomenon not seen in all of 2024.

Thursday marked the second time in recent weeks that city officials have touted a reduction in crime statistics, citing positive trends in the first quarter of 2025.

However, crime typically ebbs in the colder winter months and increases significantly over the summer, so the year’s final trends remain to be seen.

In a major city election year when policing and public safety will be paramount to campaign messaging, criminologists caution that a multitude of complex factors dictate evolving crime trends. The number of police officers and changing law enforcement tactics, for example, play a role — as do economics, social services, housing access and macro changes in human behavior.

Earlier this winter, Frey and O’Hara hailed a “turning point” in their police recruitment efforts after years of rapid decline.

For the first time since 2018, the department ended the calendar year with a net increase of officers, adding 36 sworn staff after a targeted marketing push and historic pay increase.

Applications jumped by 133% by the end of 2024, partly driven by an influx of lateral hires, legacy recruits and a monthslong “Imagine Yourself” campaign that flooded social media with ads aimed at rebranding modern policing.