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Crime, Law and Justice
Kyra Miles

Minneapolis police chief calls homicide trend 'disturbing'

Police chief and county sheriff
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara and Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt speak at a April 27 news conference.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News file

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Two violent deaths in Minneapolis in a 24-hour period has the chief of police worried.

A man was shot and killed around 7 p.m. Saturday near the Lake Street light rail station in the city’s Phillips neighborhood. A 29-year-old woman was also wounded in the shooting, transported to the hospital and is expected to survive.

Then on Sunday, a 46-year-old man was fatally stabbed around 8 a.m. in the 5200 block of Minnehaha Avenue. A 30-year-old woman was taken into custody at the scene of the stabbing. Homicide detectives are investigating both incidents.

“It’s very disturbing,” said Brian O’Hara, Minneapolis chief of police. “I mean this is what gets me up in the middle of the night, all night, checking my phone, to see what's happened.”

So far, Minneapolis police have begun investigations into 12 homicides this month—not yet counting the two incidents on Saturday and Sunday. (The medical examiner’s office must declare a cause before a death can be officially ruled a homicide.)

“The majority of the violence is driven by gun violence,” O’Hara said. “But not all of them. There’s a number of factors that go into this.”

The biggest factor, O’Hara said, is easy availability of guns. Shootings in Minneapolis spiked in mid-October, then began to decline. However, the murder rate hasn’t. The number of homicides in Minneapolis hit double digits in November and December. Some of those killings didn’t involve guns.

O’Hara pointed to the stabbing death of Robert Skafte, a dancer and clerk, at a Loring Park grocery store earlier this month that shocked neighbors, a road rage incident in the Seward neighborhood, and four murders involving people who knew each other.

“It is typical to get spikes like this during the course of the year,” O’Hara said. “It’s not typical to get it at this time of year.”

So far, the overall number of homicides in 2023 is 10 percent less than last year, but O’Hara is still worried about the current trend.