Minnesota · Comparative analysis

Did the Ramsey County CAT team move the numbers?

Auto theft fell in many U.S. cities after 2022. The real question is whether the Carjacking and Auto Theft team caused part of the Ramsey County drop, or whether thefts just dropped here the same way they dropped everywhere.

By Alex Smith, the News Desk

Last updated June 17, 2026

2025 vs. 2019 · The last year before COVID and before CAT

Ramsey County

-47%Auto theft

MVT 2,580 → 1,355

-52%Robbery

Robbery 569 → 274

Minneapolis

+69%Auto theft

MVT 2,910 → 4,911

-17%Robbery

Robbery 1,294 → 1,078

Indianapolis

+13%Auto theft

MVT 4,376 → 4,962

-61%Robbery

Robbery 2,656 → 1,048

Milwaukee

+39%Auto theft

MVT 3,470 → 4,831

-34%Robbery

Robbery 1,920 → 1,258

The team and the question

Ramsey County launched its Carjacking and Auto Theft team in September 2021. About eight deputies and analysts work out of the Sheriff’s Office, running unmarked patrols and targeting repeat offenders. The Ramsey County Attorney pays for the team through a state grant pool fed by an auto-insurance surcharge, and also pays for a dedicated auto-theft prosecutor and a youth-intervention track.

Two summer 2023 events stepped the program up. On July 1, the state grant cycle lifted Ramsey’s CAT funding by roughly 50 percent. On August 1, a new state carjacking statute (Minn. Stat. § 609.247) took effect, giving prosecutors a dedicated charge for the first time instead of folding carjacking into the broader robbery laws. The charts on this page mark both events together as the “2023 Funding Increase + Legislation” line.

News outlets and the Sheriff’s Office have cited steep drops: about a 36 percent fall in St. Paul auto thefts from early 2022 to early 2023, and a 61 percent county-wide drop over three years. Recomputed from the FBI data on this page, the two figures land at about 33 percent and 60 percent. Close to what was reported. The harder question is why.

One outside force was almost as big as the policy itself. Starting in August 2022, a TikTok challenge spread a USB-cable bypass for many 2010 to 2021 Kias and 2015 to 2021 Hyundais. Auto theft hit a national record in 2023 with those models taking six of the top ten stolen-vehicle slots. By 2024 and 2025, recalls, software updates and the simple fact that most of the vulnerable cars had already been stolen pushed thefts back down everywhere, including in cities that did nothing different. The CAT team’s window sits inside a national wave it did not cause and a national reversal that was pulling thefts down on its own.

St. Paul, the city the team is built around

Monthly St. Paul auto thefts reported to the FBI, 2018 through 2025. St. Paul peaked at 3,192 thefts in 2022, more than a year after the CAT team launched. By 2025 the city was down to 1,269, a drop of 60 percent from the 2022 peak and 48 percent below 2019.

Blue lines mark CAT Start, CAT Rollout (six months later, when the team was fully operational) and the 2023 Funding Increase + Legislation. Hover any line to see what it marks.

Just Ramsey County

Ramsey County totals (St. Paul Police plus the Sheriff’s Office) for the two crimes the CAT team was built to attack. Monthly counts for the county on their own.

Auto theft

Carjacking proxy (robbery)

Robbery is the closest stand-in for carjacking the FBI publishes (see Methodology for why), not a clean carjacking count.

Ramsey against its peers, year by year

Annual auto theft counts for Ramsey County and four comparison cities, with each city set to 100 in 2019. By 2025 Ramsey sits well below its 2019 baseline. Every comparison city is above it. Minneapolis sits across the river, the most likely place stolen activity would shift to if it shifted anywhere. It ran close to triple its baseline through 2023 before easing. Whether some of that rise is Ramsey offenders moving across the river or just Minneapolis’s own pattern is not something this data can settle.

Annual auto theft count · Indexed so 2019 = 100. Dashed horizontal line is the baseline.

Ramsey is St. Paul Police plus the Sheriff’s Office combined. The other cities are each city’s own police department.

Robbery, the closest carjacking proxy

Half of the CAT team’s name is about carjacking. Since the FBI does not publish carjacking on its own, robbery is the closest stand-in. Ramsey robbery fell 52 percent from 2019 to 2025, a real drop. But robbery fell in every comparison city too, and Indianapolis dropped further than Ramsey did.

Annual robbery count (carjacking proxy) · Indexed so 2019 = 100. Dashed horizontal line is the baseline.

Robbery covers more than carjacking. Ramsey’s decline is consistent with the CAT team having an effect, but the data cannot separate that from the wider drop in robbery across these cities.

Dedicated carjacking, the data the BCA has and the cities don’t

We went looking for carjacking-specific counts. St. Paul’s own open-data portal has no carjacking offense code. Minneapolis does, tagged CARJCK in its police-incidents service. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension exposes both, by county, from its public carjacking dashboard. That gives us a real side-by-side. Ramsey County carjackings peaked at 98 in 2021 and fell to 43 by 2025, 56 percent below peak. Hennepin fell 65 percent. Statewide MN fell 63 percent. Every jurisdiction we can measure carjacking in fell.

That matters for the attribution question. If the CAT team and the 2023 bundle were the dominant cause of Ramsey’s drop, we should see Ramsey decline sharply while jurisdictions without the same policy structure decline less. The opposite is closer to what the data show. Hennepin and Minneapolis dropped faster in percentage terms than Ramsey did over the same window. Ramsey’s absolute volume is dramatically smaller, and its decline is real, but the CAT team’s signature does not stand out in carjacking specifically the way it does in motor vehicle theft.

Carjackings per year, BCA county totals

Annual carjacking counts from the MN BCA Carjacking dashboard. Coverage begins in 2021 when MN finished migrating to NIBRS. Ramsey County here is the BCA county aggregate, which includes St. Paul Police plus every Ramsey municipal and county-sheriff agency that reports.

Minneapolis monthly carjacking, the granular timing

Minneapolis publishes carjacking-tagged incidents at the incident level so the timing is visible month by month. The chart shows the late-2021 spike clearly, then a sustained decline that begins in early 2022 and continues through every quarter since. The decline starts about a year before the 2023 bundle and just after the late-2021 peak that itself sits at the same window the Ramsey CAT team was standing up across the river. The two markers apply to Ramsey, not to Minneapolis. We keep them on the chart so the timeline aligns with the other charts on this page.

Minneapolis carjackings per month, offense code CARJCK. 2018 and 2019 are blank because Minneapolis did not track carjacking as a distinct offense before 2020.

What the data shows

Ramsey is the only city in the comparison whose 2025 auto theft volume is meaningfully below its 2019 baseline. Minneapolis sits at 169 percent of 2019. Indianapolis at 113. Ramsey at about 53.
Before 2020, the cities looked alike. The lines split apart after the Kia and Hyundai bypass went viral in late 2022, and Ramsey pulls away from the pack in 2023.
St. Paul peaked after the team launched, not before. Auto theft hit its highest annual count in 2022, well past CAT Rollout. Any explanation that gives the team credit has to also explain both that lag and the parallel drop that hit cities with no equivalent program.
The biggest single-year drop hit in 2023. St. Paul auto thefts fell 35 percent from 2022. That is the same year the new state grant and the new carjacking statute took effect. One year of data cannot tell us whether the older CAT team finally caught its stride or whether the new money and law did the work.
Robbery fell everywhere in the comparison set, not just in Ramsey. Indianapolis fell 61 percent. Milwaukee fell 34 percent. Kansas City fell 29 percent. Ramsey’s 52 percent is the steepest, but the gap between Ramsey and the rest is much smaller for robbery than for auto theft.

What the data cannot show

The FBI does not publish carjacking on its own. Robbery is the closest stand-in, but it covers many other kinds of incidents. Carjacking-specific numbers on this page come from the agencies themselves, not from FBI data anyone can check.
The CAT team did not act alone. Minnesota’s new carjacking statute, the dedicated auto-theft prosecutor, the youth-intervention track and the roughly 50 percent funding bump all hit during the same window. The data cannot separate any one piece from the rest.
The Kia and Hyundai bypass cuts both ways. The post-2022 national spike inflated every city’s numbers, then recalls and software updates pulled them back down. A city with a different car mix would have seen a smaller spike and a smaller drop regardless of what its police did.
Picking comparison cities is a judgment call. The four cities here are Midwestern police departments that reported continuously across the window and are roughly the size of St. Paul. A formal study would draw from a much wider pool.
It is hard to rule out that thefts just moved across the river. Minneapolis theft rose sharply right after Ramsey ramped up enforcement. But Minneapolis was already trending up before CAT, and Hennepin County prosecutors handled carjacking cases differently during the same window. The data cannot say which piece is doing the work.

Methodology

All counts come from the FBI Crime Data Explorer, which publishes monthly series for each police agency. We pulled auto theft and robbery for every agency from January 2018 through December 2025. Each agency reported a full 96 of 96 months.

Ramsey County here is St. Paul Police plus the Sheriff’s Office. Together they cover the large majority of county reports. Suburban departments (Maplewood, Roseville and the like) are excluded; their volumes are small next to St. Paul’s.

The comparison charts set each city to 100 in 2019. 2019 is the cleanest baseline available because it is before COVID and before the CAT team.

Carjacking does not have its own line in the FBI’s per-agency feeds. It is folded into robbery, so any chart labeled “robbery” here includes other incidents and is a noisy stand-in for carjacking on its own.

Every chart marks two CAT milestones: a CAT Start line at the September 2021 launch and a CAT Rollout line six months later, in March 2022. Six months is the standard window for a new policing team to scale up staffing, build out intelligence and shake out charging workflows. Effects credited to the team before March 2022 are partial at best.

The four comparison cities are Midwestern police departments that reported continuously across the window and are roughly the size of St. Paul. This is not a formal study. A deeper analysis with offender and victim interviews is the next piece in this series.

Comparison roster

St. Paul Police DepartmentTreated unit
Ramsey County, MN · ORI MN0620900
The big city in Ramsey County and the CAT team's main investigative partner.
Ramsey County Sheriff's OfficeTreated unit
Ramsey County, MN · ORI MN0620000
Covers the rest of Ramsey County outside St. Paul. One of the three agencies that started the CAT team.
Minneapolis Police DepartmentDisplacement target
Hennepin County, MN · ORI MN0271100
Right next door, across the river. If Ramsey enforcement pushed offenders out, Minneapolis is the most likely place they would land.
Indianapolis Metropolitan Police DepartmentComparison
Marion County, IN · ORI INIPD0000
A Midwestern city roughly the size of St. Paul that saw a delayed 2023 auto theft surge and did not run a dedicated CAT-style program.
Milwaukee Police DepartmentComparison
Milwaukee County, WI · ORI WIMPD0000
Ground zero for the Kia and Hyundai theft wave. A useful read on what the national surge looked like in a city with no CAT-style program.
Kansas City Police DepartmentComparison
Jackson County, MO · ORI MOKPD0000
A Midwestern city of similar size where the post-2022 auto theft spike has not reversed. A useful control case.

Sources

Confounders

Three independent sources cite the CAT unit's formation as September 2021 without naming a specific day. The unit was stood up inside the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office, funded by a Minnesota Department of Commerce Automobile Theft Prevention Program grant secured by the Ramsey County Attorney's Office. A companion Youth Auto Theft Intervention Project launched two months earlier in July 2021.

Midwest Safety News, the News Desk · Data current through 12/2025. Cached at content/economic-data/crime/ramsey-cat/series.json for static deploy.