Missoula Crime Report: No Felony Arrests One Day This Week
Missoula, MT (KGVO-AM News) - The Missoula County Attorney’s Office filed 15 new felony complaints this week, which is three fewer than last week and right around the weekly average. County Attorney Matt Jennings provided the report.
“We had one day this week where there were no felony arrests, and that's pretty unusual these days,” Jennings said. “Maybe once or twice a year, we don’t have any felony arrests. But we did have 10 violent crimes this week. You may recall that last week I said we only had four violent crimes, which is actually a really low number. But sadly, it seems like crime follows a roller coaster sort of pattern sometimes. 10 violent crimes this week is an alarmingly high number.”
Jennings said there were four cases involving family violence.
“Two of those were strangulations, which is something that we take very seriously,” Jennings said. “We've really learned a lot about the physiological damages strangulation can cause to a person's body and their brain, and that's one of the reasons it got its own law. We spend so much time focusing on prosecution in those cases because it's just extremely dangerous.”
In addition, there were three non-family violence cases and two sexual assault cases.
“There was one case of animal abuse, and those are all really heart-wrenching,” Jennings said. “Obviously, most of our victims are humans, but it's really sad when we see somebody abuse an animal. We had two endangerment crimes and only one property crime. A couple of years ago, we were seeing a little bit of a surge in a property crime epidemic, and that was both at lower levels and higher levels. Anecdotally, what I have been observing lately is we aren't seeing as many serious property crimes right now as we were a couple of years ago.”
However, Jennings said they are still seeing a small number of individuals in our community commit several shoplifting crimes. There were also two drug crimes this week.
READ MORE: Missoula News - Crime Reports
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: