Research, Public records study
Minnesota DWI by county: incidents, residents and law offices
123,479 impaired-driving incidents from 2018 to 2022, joined to residents and law offices in all 87 counties, with arrests, convictions, statute levels and ignition interlock figures.
Collected . Last updated . Not yet reviewed by Minnesota counsel. Download the data (CSV)
Draft for human review. This study was run by AI-assisted scripts on public files. No person has reviewed it, and no Minnesota lawyer has reviewed it. It is general information, and no firm is ranked or recommended.
The charts, county map and findings for this study are on one page.
Question, sample and how items were counted
- Question
- Where do Minnesota impaired-driving incidents happen, relative to residents and law offices, and what can public records say about choosing a lawyer?
- Sample
- All 87 Minnesota counties, statewide series from 2002 to 2023.
- Who is included
- Every county in the Department of Public Safety county tables. No lawyer or firm is scored.
- Method
- A script reads saved copies of state tables, checks that yearly figures sum to each table's totals, joins them to Census residents 15 and older and to law-office counts, and writes the CSV. Law-office counts come from Census business data used in our earlier county study and include offices of every kind.
Limitations
- Incidents are counted where they happened, so visitors, highways and enforcement affect county rates. They do not describe the people who live in a county.
- Conviction figures compare convictions to arrests as of the end of 2023 and are not a cohort. Polk County shows 108.1%. They say nothing about any lawyer.
- The count method changed in 2018, from driver-record incidents to eCharging arrests, so the series should not be compared across that break.
- Law-office counts include every kind of law office, so they are not a count of DWI lawyers.
- The Legislative Auditor says interlock differences do not show the program caused them.
What we could not collect
Court outcomes by lawyer or case
The state courts site blocked automated requests, and we did not go around that.
2021 and 2022 Impaired Driving Facts by county
The state's site did not serve those files to us, so we used the tables inside Crash Facts.
Interlock participation by county
We could not retrieve a county table.
Sources and files
- 2023 Minnesota Crash Facts
- 2022 Crash Facts
- Minnesota Statutes chapter 169A
- Office of the Legislative Auditor, ignition interlock audit
- Census Bureau ACS table B12001, 2019 to 2023
- Data for every row in this study: dwi-by-county.csv
- Every figure is computed by a script from saved copies of these files.
This site offers general information, not legal advice. Using it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Please do not send us details of your legal situation.