Over half of Minnesota's trafficking victims were minors according to crime report

ST. PAUL -- More than half of victims in human trafficking in Minnesota last year were minors,

the Minnesota Department of Public Safety wrote in its annual crime statistics report released Wednesday.

This is the first year that human trafficking data was included in the annual report.

It said there were 38 victims of human trafficking reported in Minnesota; more than half were children ages 11 to 17.

Overall, serious crime rates saw a marked decrease in 2014 from years past, the report said.

Part 1 crimes -- the most severe category of crimes in the Minnesota system -- decreased 4.4 percent from 2013. Property crimes in that category, which include burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft and arson, dropped 4.8 percent, while violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) dropped 1.2 percent.

There were 82 reported murders in 2014, down from 111 in 2013 and the lowest reported figure since 2011. Forty-six of those incidents involved guns, with handguns (37 counts) being the overwhelmingly most common weapon.

Instances of rape had a slight increase in the state in 2014. There were nine more reported rapes than 2013, with 1,980 instances reported.

The report also provided statistics for discriminatory crimes. Crimes motivated by a bias against race, religion, nationality and sexual orientation all dropped from 2013. There was a 40 percent drop in crimes motivated by race, although blacks and African-Americans continue to be targeted twice as often as the next racial group, whites. Instances of anti-LGBT crimes in 2014 were less than half than 2012.

Just nine percent of Part 1 crimes were violent crimes, as there were nearly 125,000 property crimes in Minnesota in 2014, including a 4.2 percent increase of motor vehicle theft.

Drug crimes held even for the most part, up less than a tenth of a percent. Marijuana crimes made up 60 percent of the more than 19,000 drug crimes in 2014

Online: The full Department of Public Safety 2014 Uniform Report, which includes a breakdown of many crimes by city and county, is available at http://bit.ly/1R5nmRQ .