Maple Grove City Prosecutor Sees Spike in Non-Felony Criminal Cases
As the city of Maple Grove grows, its prosecutor’s office faces a growing challenge: holding offenders accountable for crimes that don’t rise to the level of a felony.
Most crimes in Maple Grove are of the non-felony variety. Those crimes may include domestic assaults, DWIs and other traffic offenses, as well as most retail theft and property crimes.
It’s the city’s responsibility to prosecute crimes committed within its boundary that are misdemeanors and gross misdemeanors.
City Prosecutor Andrew Draper provided the city council with an update this week on his office’s caseload, which he says has significantly increased.
“There has been some exponential growth to these numbers,” said Draper.
In 2020, the city had 662 cases for non-felony crimes. That has nearly doubled in four years with 1,239 misdemeanor and gross misdemeanor cases in 2024. For comparison, Draper said the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office took on 131 cases that originated in Maple Grove for felony-level offenses in 2024.
Draper noted that Maple Grove has “a lot of retail theft.” Maple Grove has the second highest concentration of retail in the metro, behind only Bloomington, where the Mall of America is located.
Maple Grove began “in-house” prosecution in 2022 rather than contracting out. It’s one of four cities in Hennepin County to do so – the others are Minneapolis, Bloomington and Minnetonka. The Maple Grove prosecutor’s office has a staff of four to handle the city’s workload.
Maple Grove City Prosecutor Andrew Draper presented to the city council on Monday, Aug. 4
‘A pretty big conundrum’
Draper described to the council what he called key “challenges to community safety.”
He pointed to a higher number of felony-type cases being referred back to the city from the county for prosecution at the gross misdemeanor level as one challenge.
Draper said another big challenge his office faces is probation supervision, which he said is increasingly falling on the shoulders of prosecutors. Draper said supervision provided by the Hennepin County Department of Community Corrections and Rehabilitation has dropped significantly, pushing that responsibility to prosecutors.
“Prosecution offices are now becoming probation offices,” Draper told the council.
The city prosecutor’s office follows up with people on probation making sure they’re following the terms of their release.
“When you also see in combination, the amount that has been pushed back to prosecutors in terms of what we are required to supervise, and in conjunction with the amount of dispositions, that have gone up, it creates a pretty big conundrum of trying to figure the volume of cases and responsibilities,” said Draper.
Draper’s full presentation can be viewed here.
