FBI: Crime reported to police fell last year

PETE YOST

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — The num­ber of vio­lent crimes reported to police decreased 3.8 per­cent last year to 1.2 mil­lion, the fifth straight year of declines, the FBI announced Monday.

Mean­while, the total num­ber of prop­erty crimes reported to law enforce­ment agen­cies went down by 0.5 per­cent to 9 mil­lion, the ninth con­sec­u­tive year that fig­ure has fallen. Prop­erty crimes resulted in esti­mated losses of $156.6 billion.

The lat­est declines mark the con­tin­u­a­tion of a nearly two-decade drop in crime lev­els — a trend that almost no one in the field of crim­i­nol­ogy pre­dicted, said Pro­fes­sor John Caulkins of Carnegie Mel­lon Heinz Col­lege. The trend, said Caulkins, is a reflec­tion of a range of many fac­tors, includ­ing polic­ing practices.

A drop in the num­ber of peo­ple in the peak crime-age cat­e­gory of teens to 25-year-olds also con­tributed to the crime reduc­tions, Caulkins said, but added that “if this were only a story of demo­graph­ics, we would never have had this kind of sub­stan­tial decline.”

Gov­ern­ment fig­ures released two weeks ago said that vio­lent crime has fallen by 65 per­cent since 1993.

Twenty years ago, “there was a lot of hand-wringing about high crime lev­els” but “we’re way past the pos­si­bil­ity that this is a lucky con­ver­sion,” Caulkins said.

The FBI’s data showed that the South accounted for 41.3 per­cent of vio­lent crime, while the West accounted for 22.9 per­cent. The Mid­west claimed 19.5 per­cent of the cases and the North­east, 16.2 percent.

Mur­ders, rapes, rob­beries and aggra­vated assaults reported to author­i­ties all declined last year. Accord­ing to the FBI’s data for last year:

• 14,612 peo­ple were mur­dered, down 14.7 per­cent from 17,128 in 2007.

• 83,425 peo­ple were raped, down 9.4 per­cent from 92,160 in 2007.

• 354,396 peo­ple were robbed, down over 20 per­cent from 447,324 in 2007.

• 751,131 peo­ple were assaulted, down 13.3 per­cent from 866,358 in 2007.

The FBI said firearms were used in two-thirds of the nation’s mur­ders last year, and in two out of every five rob­beries and in one out of five aggra­vated assaults.

In 2011, author­i­ties solved nearly 64 per­cent of mur­ders, over 40 per­cent of forcible rapes, nearly 29 per­cent of rob­beries and nearly 57 per­cent of aggra­vated assaults.

The FBI’s crime report­ing pro­gram, which cap­tures crimes that are reported to police, is one of two sta­tis­ti­cal mea­sures of crime lev­els issued by the Jus­tice Depart­ment. His­tor­i­cally, less than half of all crimes, includ­ing vio­lent crimes, are reported to police. The other mea­sure, the national crime vic­tim­iza­tion sur­vey, is designed to cap­ture crime data whether it is reported to police or not. That sur­vey is based on inter­views of crime victims.

Two weeks ago, the vic­tim­iza­tion sur­vey reported that vio­lent crimes jumped 18 per­cent last year, the first rise in nearly 20 years, while prop­erty crimes rose for the first time in a decade. Aca­d­e­mic experts say the sur­vey data fall short of sig­nal­ing a rever­sal of the long-term decline in crime.

Caulkins said that the FBI report is prob­a­bly more reli­able as a year-to-year mea­sure, but that the vic­tim­iza­tion sur­vey also is use­ful because it includes crimes beyond those that are offi­cially reported.

The vic­tim­iza­tion sur­vey found that the increase in the num­ber of vio­lent crimes was due largely to an upward swing in sim­ple assaults, which rose 22 per­cent, from 4 mil­lion in 2010 to 5 mil­lion last year. The inci­dence of rape, sex­ual assault and rob­bery remained largely unchanged, as did seri­ous vio­lent crime involv­ing weapons or injury.

The experts said the per­cent­age increases in last year’s sur­vey were so large pri­mar­ily because the 2011 crime totals were com­pared with his­tor­i­cally low lev­els of crime in 2010.

Posted by AP News on Oct 29 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.