Port: Here’s a scary and deeply unsatisfying column about North Dakota’s growing crime problem

MINOT, N.D. — In the wee hours of Feb. 3, 2023, law enforcement officers in my community responded to a shooting at a local bar called the Dakota Lounge.

Two people were injured,

and a man was arrested on charges of aggravated assault, terrorizing, and unlawful firearm possession.

More recently, on May 14, at the Original Nightclub, which is also in Minot, a man was shot and killed. The suspect

has been arrested and charged

with manslaughter and reckless endangerment.

Remarkably, one guy was at both of these terrible incidents. Michael Davis,

who recently gave an interview to my friend Joe Skurzewski, a reporter at KMOT TV in Minot,

was one of those injured in the shooting at the Dakota Lounge, and he was for the deadly shooting at the Original.

He was a bystander, each time, he told Skurzewski. Just out with some friends to have a good time. “We need to get on top of this,” he said. “It’s the second shooting in … three months?”

He’s right. North Dakota has a problem with rising levels of violent crime. We do need to get on top of it.

I combed through

the last six annual crime reports from the Office of the Attorney General,

tracking some of the most common types of violent crimes against persons.

While the number of murders in the state was flat from 2016 to 2021, albeit with a spike during the pandemic years, other types of worrisome crime like rape, aggravated assault, simple assault, intimidation, and stalking have grown steadily, both before the pandemic and after.

Measuring the growth in these crime categories is alarming.

Rapes are up nearly 31%.

Simple assaults and aggravated assaults are up nearly 21 and 17%, respectively.

Intimidation crimes were up more than 51%, while stalking crimes were up over 41%.

Population growth doesn’t explain this dramatic growth. Our state’s population did increase from 2016 to 2021, but only by 2.5%.

The Attorney General’s Office

tracks the crime rate

in the context of population growth. For what’s called “group A” offenses — the most serious types of crimes against people, property, and society — we’ve seen a 5.26% increase in the crime rate from 2016 to 2021.

The rate for the worst types of crime is growing more than twice as fast as the population.

These numbers paint a picture of a burgeoning problem. One that has prompted many of you to think of some knee-jerk solutions that are firmly rooted in your political perspective.

Left-of-center readers perhaps see a gun problem. Right-of-center readers might be inclined to echo the arguments of Attorney General Drew Wrigley, who thinks our courts and prosecutors are going too easy on violent offenders,

and lobbied aggressively,

and ultimately unsuccessfully, for tough new sentencing laws.

But these explanations seem too simplistic. North Dakota has always had a lot of guns, and while you could argue that our state has eased gun laws in recent years, they weren’t exactly draconian in the first place. Also, can we really say that guns are driving dramatic increases in crimes like rape? Or stalking? Does a fight start because someone has a gun, or does the presence of a gun only make that fight more fraught?

On the other side of the coin, isn’t throwing more people in jail just reactionary? If we’re putting someone in jail for a violent crime, that means a violent crime has already happened. We didn’t prevent anything. And prison, it must be said,

is less of a deterrent to crime than the throw-the-book-at-them crowd likes to think.

Convenient conclusions about these rising levels of crime are just that. Convenient. When we debate problems like these, we often want to shoehorn them into existing political narratives. If we had fewer guns, tougher gun laws, more cops, and tougher sentences for criminals, all would be well, they tell us.

But there’s something else going on in our society that’s driving this.

Something more slippery. Harder to define. There is a malaise, not just in North Dakota, but in America. It’s the reason why people feel the need to carry guns when they’re out with their friends, to brandish them, and even use them if confronted with some petty argument.

It’s why our politics have grown so heated and hateful, and why demagogic political figures, who delight in painting the opposition as more than just wrong but evil, and sowing poisonous rhetoric to the masses, carry so much appeal in this moment.

We all laugh at the videos of so-called “Karens” on the internet with their let-me-talk-to-your-manager meltdowns or the ardent keyboard warriors on social media with their endless histrionics, but maybe it’s not funny. Maybe someone throwing a tirade — and live-streaming themselves doing it — because the fast food worker forgot the french fries is a symptom of a darker trend.

A darkness that has led our left-of-center friends to

shrug off burning police stations,

and our right-of-center friends to carry on as if the Jan. 6, 2021, riot was just

a normal visit to the capitol by a bunch of tourists.

My point is that we know there’s a problem. We can measure it in our crime data. It unfolds in front of us on our various screens. And yet it’s not a problem that ready-made solutions like gun control or tough-on-crime policies can easily address. There may not even be a public policy solution. This may be something we have to address in our homes and our churches. In our schools, civic organizations, and social clubs.

We need Americans to choose to be better. We need them to be less paranoid, and more patient. Less angry, and more willing to live and let live.

And if you have any ideas on accomplishing that, I’m all ears.