Missoula Crime Report: Children Were Exposed to Drugs

Missoula, MT (KGVO-AM News) - The Missoula County Attorney’s Office filed 14 new criminal complaints this week, which is five more than last week and less than the weekly average. Chief Deputy County Attorney Matt Jennings provided this week’s report. 

“We charged three endangerment crimes and I wanted to highlight that this week because a couple of those were children being exposed to drugs,” Jennings said. “We talk about this all the time. Drugs in our community are really tough and they're related to a lot of the crimes that we see. We often try and get people help and we acknowledge some of the struggles that people go through, but when kids are getting exposed to stuff, we start taking that really seriously because we don't want to see intergenerational issues related to addiction and some of the problems that causes.” 

In addition, Jennings said there were three property crimes and four drug crimes. 

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“In our 14 felonies that we charged, four of those were violent crimes,” Jennings said. “We usually charge about 50% of our crimes being violent, so that's a little bit low for the week and always good news to us. Within the violent crimes, only one of those was family violence, and that is good to see because this time of year when folks are kind of crammed together and can't get out or blow off steam if they're having problems in their relationships, we actually see a lot of domestic violence around this time of year and especially coming out of the holidays. We didn't this week so good news to us.” 

Jennings said there was one sexual intercourse without consent case that was charged in-custody, which means the defendant got arrested shortly after the incident occurred.  

“That is a little bit rare for us because usually, those cases take a lot of investigation, but when somebody does perpetrate a crime of that magnitude and gets put into custody, we prioritize that as well,” Jennings said. 

The Missoula County Attorney’s Office provides a weekly crime report every Friday morning at 9:00 on Talk Back. You can listen to Jennings’ full report below: