To Tom Ryan, there was no better place to open a branch of his chain Tom’s Watch Bar than at the corner of Sixth and Hennepin in downtown Minneapolis.

Leading up to opening in 2022, Ryan said people told him he was crazy for opening in the city center. But he believed that opening a new business was an opportunity to continue to build safety in the community. “We think it’s a really good idea to take safe and calculated bets on being on the leading edge of resurgence,” said Ryan, a food industry vet who also founded the Smashburger chain. “And so when people in Minneapolis say, ‘Oh, you’re downtown, how’s that going?’ I’m like, ‘When’s the last time you’ve been down there?'”

Crime has been a major talking point as city and business leaders have looked at the future of downtown Minneapolis. It’s a factor considered when bringing employees back to the office. And it reaches beyond the state. Just days ago, Target announced it would close nine stores across four other states due to retail theft.

Yet it can be hard to fully grasp crime’s impact on a community by simply watching news about it and scrolling through social media. It can often feel like the problem is worse than it’s ever been. The numbers indicate otherwise, however. Last month, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) released a report showing there was an 8.6% year-over-year decrease in violent crime in 2022 across the state. Property crimes were also significantly down, though car thefts have continued to increase since 2018. The BCA numbers represent the state as a whole, but crime in the city is also overall down, according to a report by the Star Tribune.

Though violent crime has dropped year over year, it notably still remains higher than it was pre-pandemic, according to the report. Certainly, that weighs heavy on many folks’ minds. “Let’s not get too comfy too fast with a one-year decrease in violent crime,” Republican state Sen. Warren Limmer told the Star Tribune.

But Ryan with Tom’s Watch Bar is hopeful that the decrease in crime is part of a longer-term trajectory.  Though it’s only been about a year since he opened the sports bar at the heart of downtown, he said he’s felt supported by the downtown community and law enforcement. He believes that community increases the safety of the area.

“When we found this site on Sixth and Hennepin, we took the calculated risks knowing full well that there were reputational issues both downtown and uptown, but we also felt compelled to want to be part of bringing the rigor back into downtown the right way,” he said.

The perception of crime can come from news reports and social media, but the image painted often skews from what is seen in actual communities, said Christopher Uggen, professor of sociology and law at the University of Minnesota.

“We know that perception of or fear tracks somewhat separately from crime itself,” he said. “One of the ways we pick up on that is if you ask people: Do you think the crime rate is rising or falling? Almost everybody will think that it’s rising most of the time… but if you ask them if the crime rate is getting better or worse in their neighborhood, they’ll say, ‘No, it’s pretty good around here. I feel safe walking in my neighborhood.’”

In Minneapolis in particular, the community has been through even more trauma than many other urban centers between the murder of George Floyd and unrest that followed.

And it cannot be ignored that there is a rational component behind the fear of crime, Uggen noted. A rise in aggravated assault and carjacking over the last year means more people have faced fear of death or injury.

“There is a rational component, but there’s also this irrational one that amps up the fear,” he said. “I think the business community is quite right to say we’ve got to get folks downtown and just seeing and feeling how normal it is.”

In a recent interview with the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal last month, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said that when crime does occur, it’s usually not during business hours. Rather, he said it often happens after hours when people get intoxicated and find themselves in an interpersonal dispute.