Missoula, MT (KGVO-AM News) - The Missoula County Attorney’s Office filed 16 new felony complaints this week, which is two less than last week and right around the weekly average. According to County Attorney Matt Jennings, six of those were violent crimes.   

“We had four endangerment crimes and they are almost always related to drinking and driving,” Jennings said. “We had two property crimes, three drug crimes, and one administrative crime, which I believe was a fugitive warrant. Within our violent crime category, we had two family violence incidents, three non-family or robbery-related incidents, and we did have a very terrifying stranger rape allegation in a park in Missoula.” 

Whenever they get an allegation like that, Jennings said they are all hands on deck making sure they are doing anything they can to protect the community from sexual predators. 

In addition, Jennings said there has been an uptick recently in the number of drug-related DUIs. 

“A lot of this is related to fentanyl where essentially people are passing out at the wheels, sometimes in an intersection, sometimes getting into recks, sometimes just idling their vehicles, but we're trying to stop them before they drive,” Jennings said. “We've had a lot of challenges to prosecuting those. The Montana County Attorneys Association is trying to find a sponsor for some legislation during this legislative session that could create certain cutoff limits for the amount of drugs in somebody's body that would be safe for somebody to drive.” 

READ MORE: Missoula News - Crime Reports

Jennings hopes that is something the legislature will consider making enforcement of these DUIs a little bit easier.  

“Sometimes people need to be educated about what these substances are doing to their bodies, but whether it's alcohol or another drug, don't get behind the wheel if you're impaired at all,” Jennings said. “I remind people all the time, that while we might be concerned about things like gun violence in our community, far more people die from DUI-related offenses than any other criminal act in the state of Montana. If you're worried about your families or somebody being out there and being injured, it's really a DUI that you should be concerned about.” 

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: 

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