Hennepin County Sheriff's Office Plans To Use Violence Task Force, Auto Theft Unit To Combat Crime This Summer

MINNEAPOLIS — As summer moves in, the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office is expecting crime to go up as more people are out.

"There's a lot more people coming into the city, people from outside of town," Major Rick Palaia with HCSO said. "There's a lot more activity."

"We usually see things get a lot busier during the summer," he added.

Palaia says there's some areas they're looking at, including guns, fentanyl and gang activity. He says guns are something they've struggled with.

"We've seen over the last, especially couple years, kids younger and younger getting involved with gang activity or drug activity," Palaia said.

The department's Violent Offender Task Force is seeing this rise already. Palaia says so far this year, they've had 178 arrests, taken 74 guns off the street, seized 10 pounds and 30,000 pills of fentanyl, along with thousands more grams of meth and cocaine.

"Our Violent Offender Task Force, they focus on guns, they focus on these problems when there's people out," he said.

That task force has seen so much recently that Sheriff Dawanna Witt released a statement discussing their work recently, including multiple stolen cars and car chases throughout their day.

"We're lucky that they're willing to do that, and they will probably see more guns as summer heats up," Palaia said.

Palaia says they also have an Auto Theft Unit working closely with the Violent Offender Task Force to stop carjackings and other auto thefts.

"They put their lives on the line every single day to try and get guns off the street, to get drugs off the street and to provide a safer public," Palaia said.

SOURCE: KARE 11