What public datasets exist for law enforcement arrests in Minnesota by city, ethnicity, and charge since 2020?
Executive summary
Minnesota maintains several public data sources that include arrests by charge and — to varying degrees — by race/ethnicity and city; the central repository is the Minnesota Crime Data Explorer maintained by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), supplemented by agency-level open data (notably Minneapolis) and thematic dashboards for DWI and drug crimes [1] [2] [3]. Significant caveats apply: ethnicity collection is inconsistent across agencies and small-population suppression rules and reporting system transitions (to NIBRS) affect completeness for 2020–present [4] [5].
1. The statewide hub: Minnesota Crime Data Explorer and the BCA Data Portal
The Minnesota Crime Data Explorer is the state’s modernized, public-facing portal for incidents, arrests, and related crime measures and has been the BCA’s primary public database since its 2021 rollout, taking over and modernizing the former Uniform Crime Report publication flow [1] [2]. The BCA Data Portal hosts multiple collections used by researchers and the public and explicitly points users toward the Crime Data Explorer for aggregated arrest and incident information, while also offering specialized dashboards [2].
2. Official annual and legislative reports: Uniform Crime Report and state summaries
Legislative Uniform Crime Report supplements published by the state summarize data contained in the Crime Data Explorer and NIBRS submissions; these annual reports enumerate statewide arrest totals, breakdowns by sex and offense categories, and explain NIBRS Group A/B distinctions relevant to charge-level analysis [5] [1]. Those reports provide a statutory and methodological context for arrest counts since 2020 and document statewide totals and trends that researchers can trace across years [5].
3. City- and agency-level public datasets, including Minneapolis open data
Cities and police departments publish local datasets that can be merged with state data for city-by-city analysis; Minneapolis provides a public Crime Dashboard and an OpenData portal dataset of crime and arrests that allow city-level queries by offense and location [6] [3]. Other jurisdictions often submit data to the BCA but may also operate their own dashboards — the BCA portal directs users to both centralized and agency-specific collections [2].
4. Thematic dashboards: DWI, drug crimes and overdose monitoring
For charge-specific analysis in narrow domains, the BCA offers a Minnesota DWI Dashboard for impaired-driving arrests and a Drug Crimes and Overdose Dashboard tied to the state’s Drug Monitoring Initiative; these provide incident and arrest trends for specific offense types since they are maintained as discrete collections [2]. Analysts seeking arrests by charge for DWI or drug offenses will find these dashboards useful complements to the broader Crime Data Explorer [2].
5. Data on race/ethnicity and known limitations
Public datasets do include race and gender fields in many cases, and Minnesota-level arrest race breakdowns are available historically (e.g., MN Compass citing BCA Uniform Crime Reports from 1997 to present), but significant limitations are documented: not all law enforcement agencies collect or report ethnicity consistently, Latino individuals may be coded as White in some reporting, and suppression rules hide rates for small populations — all of which complicate reliable city-by-city ethnicity analysis since 2020 [7] [4]. The Justice Reinvestment Initiative and BCA materials explicitly warn about missing ethnicity data and quality issues tied to agency participation and the 2021 transition to modernized reporting [4] [1].
6. Practical access, recommended approach, and caveats for researchers
A researcher seeking arrests by city, ethnicity, and charge since 2020 should begin with the BCA Crime Data Explorer and Data Portal for statewide and agency-submitted NIBRS data, supplement those with municipal open-data portals like Minneapolis’ dataset, and use thematic dashboards for DWI and drug arrests; however, any cross-jurisdictional ethnic-disaggregation must account for inconsistent ethnicity collection, suppressed small-cell data, and the reporting transition to NIBRS, all noted in the BCA and analytic briefs [2] [4] [5]. Where ethnicity is incomplete, analysts should disclose these reporting gaps rather than infer absence of disparity; the Minnesota Department of Human Rights’ MPD review illustrates how localized analyses can reveal racial patterns but require careful data vetting and contextual interpretation [8].