For Second Consecutive Year, Violent And Property Crime Rates Increased In 2012
By Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs
Published: Thursday, Oct. 24, 2013 - 7:05 am
Violent and property crime rates rose for U.S. residents in 2012, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. These estimates are based on data from the annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) which has collected information from victims of crime age 12 or older since 1973.
The NCVS is a giant survey of 162,000 people about whether they were the victims of crime in the past year. Here's the new report (PDF).
This is different from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting, which tabulate the cops' numbers. The victimization survey explains:
The annual increase in violent victimizations in 2012, based
on the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) National Crime
Victimization Survey (NCVS), was consistent with the overall
increase in violent crime shown in the findings from the
FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program (table 9).
The increase in property victimizations from the NCVS was
inconsistent with the FBI’s finding of a slight decline in
overall property crime. ...
The number of violent crimes known to the police as
measured by the UCR increased by 0.7%, from 2011 to 2012,
and the number of property crimes declined by about 0.9%.
During the same period, the number of violent crimes in
the NCVS increased by 17.7% and the number of property
crimes increased by 15.0%.
Maybe smartphone theft is up, but people don't bother to report it?
The DoJ press release continues:
The violent crime rate (which includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated and simple assault) rose from 22.6 victimizations per 1,000 persons in 2011 to 26.1 in 2012.
That's a 15% increase per capita in one year, 18% in absolute numbers. Not good.
Fortunately, the homicide rate inched downward in per capita terms.
Crime not reported to police and simple assault accounted for the majority of this increase. Violent victimizations not reported to police increased from 10.8 per 1,000 persons in 2011 to 14.0 in 2012, and simple assault rates rose from 15.4 to 18.2 per 1,000. The rate of violent crime reported to police did not change significantly from 2011 to 2012.
The rate of property crime (which includes burglary, theft and motor vehicle theft) increased from 138.7 per 1,000 households in 2011 to 155.8 in 2012, primarily due to an increase in theft.
Up 12 percent per capita.
The rate of theft victimization increased from 104.2 per 1,000 households in 2011 to 120.9 in 2012.
In 2012, 44 percent of violent victimizations and 54 percent of serious violent victimizations were reported to police. These percentages were not statistically different from 2011. The percentage of property victimizations reported to police declined from 37 percent in 2011 to 34 percent in 2012. ...
Violent crime rates increased slightly in 2012 for blacks but remained stable for whites and Hispanics.
Those are rates of being victimized by crime, not in committing crime.
So, hard to say what's going on, but the 2011 and 2012 news, while not terrible, hasn't been good after modest declines in crime during the early years of the recession.
Are we going to talk about WHAT THOMAS SOWELL POSTED AT NRO YESTERDAY?!?
ReplyDeleteOr is that too hot of a potato for even iSteve to handle?
Smartphone theft seems like a great crime.
ReplyDeleteYou steal someone's phone and what are they going to do? Call 911?
I'm betting a lot of the violent crime rise are random assaults (without robbery) by NAMs on whites and Asians. These either don't get reported by the victims or, even more likely, they are not recorded by the police. There are no charges since the perpetrator(s) laid a beat down and left, and there's no way to find them (unless a Worldstar video shows up). But of course the victim reports that he was a victim.
ReplyDeleteSteve, did you see this?
ReplyDelete"Why are there more runners in D.C.? It's not where we are, it's who we are"
"So, hard to say what's going on
ReplyDeleteThe children of the illegal immigrant wave that started in the mid-90s are starting to hit adolescence and adulthood in force.
Further, inm ultiple ways, this administration has sent a message of lawlessness to every leftist across the land.
1. The Henry Gates fiasco ("The police acted stupidly").
2. The Trayvon Martin fiasco ('If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon').
3. The DOJ policy admonishing businesses from considering arrest records in hiring policies, else face discrimination suits.
4. The blatant disregard of immigration laws WRT so-called "Dreamers."
5. The targetting of conservative groups by the IRS.
6. The Pigford scandal, awarding billions of dollars in bogus discrimination claims to black "farmers."
7. The refusal to clamp down on welfare fraud, food stamp fraud, Obamaphone fraud, ad nauseum.
8. The targetting of states who require photo IDs to vote.
9. Twisting the arms of businesses in ways far too numerous to list.
This is the most extremist, lawless administration ever, and the message is starting to get through. Obama targets and punishes the law-abiding while sending a message that crime will be tolerated.
"Residents in the West had higher rates of violent victimization than residents in other regions of the country."
ReplyDeleteWTF? I'd bet that not even in the old days of the "Wild Wild West" were crime rates higher there than in the East. This seems a new thing. Gee, I wonder what could be causing it?
This news story linked in the article you mentioned suggests one reason why crime (esp. property crime) is way up: "incarceration for drug offenses is way down from 3 years ago: On the last day of 2010, about 25,000 drug criminals were in California prisons. On the last day of 2012, that number had fallen 50 percent to roughly 12,400."
ReplyDeleteCalifornia - population 38 million, 46% of whom are Hispanic, black or American Indian - has less than 1 person in 3000 in prison for drug crimes, down half from just 3 years ago. That's a big reason why crime is up. My experience is that when addicts aren't in jail, they spend a lot of their time committing small property crimes to pay their way, since they frequently can't hold down a job.
This puts California (and the USA after it) in a pickle: we can barely handle the Latino invasion if the police are able to clamp down on the higher crime that results. But states face tightening budgets due to the increased poverty that results, so they can't clamp down on crime, they release the "minor criminals," and crime rates go up.
The Latin immivasion should've led to higher crime rates almost immediately. But the dot com boom and the housing boom left government (esp. California) flush with revenue. So the consequences were delayed...until now.
Now we have a double whammy: a booming native-born Hispanic teenage population, who needn't fear deportation, and states unable to lock up minor criminals, who are free to commit minor crimes over and over.
Buy yourself a some firearms and security cameras: it's gunna keep getting worse.
Here is the question: is the homicide rate going down because of better trauma treatment or is it going down because of a lack of trying?
ReplyDelete"Here is the question: is the homicide rate going down because of better trauma treatment or is it going down because of a lack of trying?"
ReplyDeleteLast I checked, shootings were down at roughly the same rate as homicides. It's unlikely that it's due to improved emergency care.
Crime tends to be intra-racial (people victimize those within their own racial groups), so the safe money would be on an increase in crime committed by blacks, while whites and hispanics stayed steady.
ReplyDelete@Geoff,
ReplyDeleteOne of the surprising things about the Ron Unz article on race and crime is that the white crime rate is rising. I don't know if that's true; the article was interesting but had some questionable stats. Someone should check that out.
Anonymous 7:48,
ReplyDeleteDo they fold white-hispanics in with whites for this study?
That's typically what I've seen.
Obligatory "but gringos commit crime too" statement. Just curious.
If you think blacks are surly now, just wait until Obama steps down.
ReplyDeleteOne thing to bear in mind; much crime goes unreported. Rape being a cardinal example.
ReplyDeleteEver tried to report a property crime to the police? They do everything they can to discourage you. The first thing they say is usually to tell you that they won't being doing anything to investigate other than than take your report and presumably put it in drawer and never look at again.
ReplyDeleteI don't believe that crime has fallen nearly as far as the establishment wants us to believe. This "performance based policing" has lead to police commanders lying more to protect their jobs.
Wait, doesn't the quoted text say that a 0.7% increase in violent crime "was consistent with" a 15% increase in violent crime?
ReplyDeleteOn its face, that seems like an almost Soviet-style big lie.
"You steal someone's phone and what are they going to do? Call 911?"
ReplyDeleteMany smartphones and laptop computers now have antitheft software installed on them. So, it may not be so bright to steal one. Quarterback Cam Newton was accused of stealing a laptop at Florida. The police were able to track it down all the way to his dorm room.