MAP: Lynnhurst Block Raided By Garage Burglars

Despite  ostensiably linked to a summer surge in garage burglaries, over a dozen houses across Southwest Minneapolis saw their garages broken into Sunday night and early Monday morning.

A total of 14 were hit between 8:30 p.m. on Sunday and 10:00 a.m. on Monday, according to reports filed by officers with the Minneapolis Police Department. Several of the cases were clustered together, including three neighboring houses on the 5000 block of Oliver Avenue south. In each case, criminals nabbed expensive bicycles and pocket change from cars parked in the garages. The pattern continues a trend Minneapolis police warned residents about on Monday.

Unusually, the burglary spree's intensity seemed to show through in the redacted, public versions of police reports posted for public reading in the basement of Minneapolis City Hall. Reports filed earlier in the day went into detail about individual crimes, with the amount of information shrinking down to brief statements that burglaries had been committed at certain addresses as officers discovered more and more burglaries as Monday morning wore on.

Police spokesperson Sgt. Steven McCarty  that investigators were examining whether a gang or group of individuals could be stealing the multi-thousand-dollar bicycles and fencing them.

McCarty told Patch that the best way to prevent garage burglaries is to make sure every window and door is shut and locked, and possibly deadbolted. However, six of the garages in Sunday night's crimes had been locked up, but their doors had been pried open.

It can be just as important, McCarty said, to record the serial numbers on your bicycle frames. These can be fed into a national database used by pawn shops to make sure they are not purchasing stolen goods.

McCarty said extra officers were being deployed to patrol the Fifth Precinct in the late night and early morning in marked and unmarked cars.