The head of a nonprofit made up of concerned parents and other University of Minnesota stakeholders on Monday said reports of crime in neighborhoods surrounding the Minneapolis campus have been up since November when compared to the number of reports in the same months a year ago.

The nonprofit formed in 2022 is known as the Campus Safety Coalition.

President Brian Peck said the coalition has been compiling Minneapolis Police Department data virtually ever since, zeroing in on the neighborhoods that surround the university, including Prospect Park, Marcy Holmes, Stadium Village and Dinkytown, where a tobacco shop was the site of a double homicide in December.

It’s “where all the students… live. They, you know, they socialize in those areas,” Peck explained.

“And so, the issue has always been off campus where the crime has been a problem. It hasn’t been on campus.”

By Peck’s calculations, which were laid out in charts updated monthly, crime was trending down across the board in the tracked area for most of 2023 compared to 2022. That changed in November.

The neighborhoods in question combined saw a 33% spike in all reported crime (violent and non-violent) from 129 instances in November 2022 to 171 in November 2023, according to the Campus Safety Coalition data, which also showed that the trend continued for the next four months.

According to the charts, there was an 18% rise from 136 reports in December 2022 to 160 in December 2023, a 26% increase from 137 reports in January 2023 to 172 in January 2024. There was also a 23% increase from 149 reports in February 2023 compared to 183 last month — which averages out to a little more than an additional call a day for a four-month span.

The neighborhoods the coalition is tracking are not under the jurisdiction of the University of Minnesota Police Department (UMPD), nor are they entirely made up of student activity. However, Peck reported that over the same four months everywhere else in the city, the data showed crime continued to drop year-over-year.

“So this is specific to the geography around the University of Minnesota campus,” Peck said.

UMPD Police Chief Matt Clark, in an update at a University of Minnesota Board of Regents Meeting on Friday, cited a slight rise, specifically in violent crime on campus, comparing 31 incidents in all of 2023 to 23 back in 2022. He said the statistics included an increase from six to eight aggravated assaults year-over-year, and robberies went from four in 2022 to seven throughout 2023. The remaining 16 violent crime incidents “were related to criminal sexual conduct,” Chief Clark said.

“It would be better if we were at zero for campus crime, what we strive to achieve, but that is still a relatively low number, considering the number of people and the space we occupy between St. Paul and Minneapolis,” he continued.

The update came along with an introduction of plans for an off-campus “safety center” in Dinkytown.

Details are limited and a location was not selected, but the idea is to create a central space for added police presence and other public safety-related groups and resources.

“It would also be a location for our safety ambassadors, some of our community elders we worked with in the summer, especially, and our first responders to go to at night,” Clark said, adding, “The center would be beneficial to safety, not only off campus, but on campus as well.”

“We have been asking for this for a couple years now,” Peck reacted. “And this is something that, by just having a presence in Dinkytown, is going to have huge benefits.”

A more concrete vision for the center is expected in the fall.

Clark also mentioned plans to expand UMPD’s mutual aid efforts to help the severely short-staffed Minneapolis Police Department respond to calls in areas, particularly Dinkytown, near campus.

The Minneapolis Police Department has not confirmed or denied the Campus Safety Coalition’s interpretation of its statistics as of this report.