Crime is everywhere. Crime is present in the cities, the small towns, and the rural plains of the mid-west. There's no escaping it — but there are places in the world where crime is much less common. Manitowoc County is now synonymous with Making A Murderer, and the murder of Teresa Halbach, but is Manitowoc County really just a violent place where something like that could happen? What are the crime rates in Manitowoc County?
According to city-data.com, crime in Manitowoc is relatively low compared to other parts of the country. In 2005, only one murder was reported in Manitowoc County. (It's not confirmed, but it's likely that this statistic reflects the murder of Teresa Halbach.) Homicide may not be the norm in Manitowoc County, but there is still wrongdoing. In 2005, the Manitowoc sheriff's office reported 29 assaults, six assaults of a sexual nature, and 203 thefts. For a county where the population is around 81,000 people, those statistics are pretty tame.
The city of Manitowoc, itself, holds most of the crime that occurs in the county, which still isn't much. Since 2001, Manitowoc has only had three murders reported. The most common crime in Manitowoc seems to be theft, much like Steven Avery committed in his youth when he broke into a bar and stole a few cans of beer and a couple of sandwiches. There are, however, some odd statistics that pop up when looking at the last 15 years of crime in Manitowoc.
- There was an immense spike in assaults in 2006. The city usually has around 20-50 yearls assaults, but in 2006 they had 166 assaults.
- In 2013, the most recent year with accessible crime information via city-data.com, Manitowoc had rates above the average U.S. rate for sexual assaults.
- Manitowoc's high theft-rate is frequently around, or over, the U.S. average rate.
It's no wonder that Manitowoc — and Wisconsin as a whole — started to run wild with the Avery case once it got to the media. Murders just don't seem to happen all that often in Manitowoc, especially the violent, sexual crime that Brendan Dassey's confession made it sound like.
Image: Netflix
