Violent crimes, overall, saw a slight decline but the Murders still remain on an increase in the first half of 2017, shows the data released on Tuesday by FBI, however, the increase rate is very slow for the murders than those of previous years.
The new data, as per the part of FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program that is responsible to gather the data and process it from 13000 law enforcement agencies present nationwide, and then compare the statistics from the first half of 2017 with the first half of 2016.
The complete overlook of the violent crime rates shows a decline of 0.8% in the very first half of the year 2017 when compared with 2016’s first half. This drop was caused because of the declines in the rape rate, which dropped to 2.4%, and crimes like aggravated assault and robbery went down by 0.1 and 2.2% respectively.
However, these rates of murder and the non-negligent manslaughter have seen an increase of 1.5% over the same time frame, though it still is a drop of 1.9% in murder rates of the cities with populations crossing a million, including Chicago, but not Baltimore and Washington D.C. This drop is compensated by the increase in the murder rates in the smaller cities, which include a staggering 18.7% increase in the murder rates of cities with populations between 500 thousand and a million people.
Similarly, property crimes saw a drop by 2.9% in first half of 2017, Burglaries dropped down to 6.1% while the larceny-thefts decreased by 3%. Motor vehicles theft, on the other hand, saw a rise by 4.1%.
If these trends withhold through all of the years. This would add up to a jumbled but proper and positive news for the trends of crime rates in the USA. 2016 saw a very violent crime increase of 3.4% when compared to the year 2015, including the massive 8.2% increase in murders. 2016 was marked the second year that had a violent rate to be increased, which was a reversal of decline faced during the last decade.
The drop in the overall violent crimes and the gradual slowing of the rate of the growth of homicides is indicative of the fact that the two-year spike may now slow down or follow reverse trends. The Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in an editorial, said, by attributing the positive trends to President Trump and its administration’s active and aggressive anti-violence policy stance.
“Trump ran for office on a message of law and order, and he won. When he took office, he ordered the Department of Justice to stop and reverse these trends—and that is what we have been doing every day for the past year. … Ensuring every neighborhood in America is safe again will take time, but we are already starting to see results,” Sessions wrote.
He too noted that “publicly available data for the rest of the year suggest further progress,” hinting that strongly expects more crime decline through the end of 2017.