Police in Minnesota say despite the persistence of violent crime in the state, they’ve been stretched thin while leaders blew millions on programs rife with fraud, according to a report Wednesday by Fox News Digital.
Those priorities have come into focus as the state deals with a massive scandal involving “allegations of taxpayer money finding its way to the terrorist group Al-Shabaab in Somalia, all under the nose of Democratic leaders,” the news outlet reported.
“We’ve been down anywhere from 50 to over 100 officers since 2020, and we just haven’t recovered from that,” Mark Ross, president of the St. Paul Police Federation, told the outlet. “Right now we’re about a thousand police officers short in the state of Minnesota, and we’re on pace to lose another 2,000 to 2,500 over the next few years.”
According to the Fox report:
The staffing shortages come as Minnesota recorded 170 murders in 2024, according to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), only slightly below the year before, with firearms involved in nearly 75% of those killings. Statewide, carjackings rose 5.5% and rapes increased 5.2% from 2023 to 2024. Assaults on peace officers also jumped up 1.5%.
Ross said recruitment and retention are at a crisis point, not only in St. Paul but statewide.
“The overall landscape for policing in Minnesota has gotten really, really competitive,” he explained. “We’re losing officers to other departments paying more and offering greater incentives.”
As Breitbart News reported this week, millions have been looted from a federal government program intended to feed children during the coronavirus pandemic, which has resulted in more than 50 convictions involving the state’s politically influential Somali community.
The New York Times also reported late last month that federal prosecutors said as much as $1 billion in taxpayer money may have been stolen in separate fraudulent schemes.
“These billions of dollars could have been spent on public safety, but it’s gone… “ Ross said. “And we’ll never see that money again.”
Randy Sutton, a police veteran and founder of The Wounded Blue, told the Fox outlet that the shortages have put officers themselves at greater risk.
“Last year, more than 85,000 American officers were assaulted… every single day an officer is being shot,” Sutton said. “We’ve never seen volume like this.”
According to the Fox report:
Both experts warn that Minnesotans may not fully grasp the extent of the public-safety crisis, especially in the metro areas where crime is concentrated. While violent crime dipped slightly in greater Minnesota, the BCA (Bureau of Criminal Apprehension) reports a 1% rise in violent crime across the seven-county Twin Cities region, including Minneapolis and St. Paul, where police staffing has been hit hardest.
Sutton said those numbers also are not accurate, in that some people are “reluctant” to report crime and some police agencies in the state are not reporting crime to the FBI, which tracks such trends.
A spokesperson for Gov. Tim Walz defended the administration’s record to Fox Digital.
“The Governor signed the largest public safety budget in state history, investing money in every single police department in the state,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson also pointed out that most of the fraud was from programs that were federally funded, “so police funding is not affected” by the theft.
“You can’t frame things that way,” he said. “It all comes from the same pool of money. Those are tax dollars. I think taxpayers would not be amused by that response.”
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
