Missoula Crime Report: One of the Busiest Weeks of 2023

Missoula, MT (KGVO-AM News) - The Missoula County Attorney’s Office charged 30 new criminal complaints this week, which is 11 more than last week and way higher than the weekly average. According to Chief Deputy County Attorney Matt Jennings, that doesn’t necessarily mean there were more crimes this week. 

“This is a time of year where things actually slow down a little bit in our office and allow us to catch up on some cases that have been sitting there for a couple of weeks that might take a little bit more time to charge,” Jennings said. “We had 15 in-custody arrests. That means somebody was out getting the police called on them or observed by law enforcement and actually getting arrested at that moment. Then about 15 of them were out of custody and those are often property crimes, things like embezzlement or something that took a little bit longer to investigate, but nonetheless, this was one of our busiest weeks of the year.” 

Out of the 30 felonies this week, nine were violent crimes, nine were endangerment crimes, three were property crimes, five were drug crimes, and four were administrative crimes. According to Jennings, another thing they start seeing around this time of the year is a lot of DUIs. 

“We always see those, but when we have things like a really exciting Griz game last weekend, or holidays coming up, sometimes people take their celebration a little bit too far and they haven't arranged a safe ride home,” Jennings said. “More and more, it seems like we're getting a lot of repeat DUI offenders. We're getting somebody on their 5th, 6th, 7th, or sometimes even 12th or 13th DUI and those are things that we take extremely seriously.” 

One of the things Jennings wanted to highlight was the number of tragic vehicle on pedestrian or vehicle on motorcycle accidents this year. 

“We ended up charging five different cases,” Jennings said. “Two of those involved deaths and they were sadly the death of a pedestrian and the death of a motorcyclist from this summer. Three of them were very serious injuries of car on pedestrian. This is just what we charged this week, but boy, we've had a lot this year. We've noticed patterns that they are at certain intersections or certain circumstances that are leading to that and we look forward to working with some of our city and county leaders to see if we can actually prevent these types of accidents in the future.” 

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: