In today’s Washington Post we read that
[v]iolent crime in the United States rose more than previously believed in 2006, continuing the most significant increase in more than a decade, according to an FBI report released yesterday. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program found that robberies surged by 7.2 percent and homicides rose 1.8 percent from 2005 to 2006. Violent crime overall rose 1.9 percent, substantially more than an increase of 1.3 percent estimated in a preliminary FBI report in June. The jump was the second in two years, following a 2.3 percent rise in 2005. Taken together, the two years represent the first steady increase in violent crime since 1993, FBI records show. The uptick presents a significant political challenge for the Bush administration, which has faced growing criticism from congressional Democrats, big-city mayors, and police chiefs for presiding over cuts in federal assistance to local law enforcement agencies over the past six years.
According to Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which studies crime trends, the FBI report shows “a significant departure from the previous ten years of fairly flat or declining crime numbers.” According to Wexler, “What it underscores is what a number of communities have been seeing firsthand, and that is a spike in street-level violent crime. For some cities, crime is back as a significant issue.”
The increase in violent crime is real and should be taken seriously—but so should context. There is, in fact, no “significant departure” from the previous ten years of data. In fact, in every single category—rates of violent crime, murder/non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, property crime, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft—we are in better shape, and in several respects in significantly better shape, than ten years ago.
If you go to the FBI’s website, you will find that the violent crime rate (the rate per 100,000 inhabitants) has increased a bit during the last two years—but that it is still lower than it was in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003—and it is far below where it was during the 1980’s and the 1990’s. For example, the violent crime rate in 1989 was 666.9 per 100,000 inhabitants; it rose to 757.7 in 1992 and dropped to 523.0 in 1999. For 2006 the violent crime rate is 473.5 per 100,000 inhabitants—after having reached a low two years earlier (463.2).
We find the same trend in the murder and non-negligent manslaughter rate. In 1989, the murder rate was 8.7 per 100,000 inhabitants; in 1991 it rose to 9.8 and by 1999 it had dropped to 5.7. During this decade the murder rate has fluctuated between 5.5 and 5.7 per 100,000 inhabitants (5.7 per 100,000 inhabitants is where we are now). It’s worth recalling, too, that leading crime experts predicted a “coming crime wave” during the last half of the 1990’s and the first half of this decade—and that, instead, total crime, property crime, violent crime, and murder rates plummeted.
In the last dozen or so years we have witnessed a social indicators revival that is remarkable and in some areas even stunning—and America today is significantly safer than it was in past decades.
