For the past several years there’s been something of a mixed message coming from the nation’s law enforcement agencies. Even as we’ve seen murder rates and incidents of other violent crimes going up in a number of major cities (not including New York and Los Angeles, by the way), the message was always tempered. These were localized problem areas and the overall crime rate remained at least stable, if not slightly decreasing across the entire country. In fact, we were still at nearly historic lows, compared to the bad old days of the early to mid-90s.The "Ferguson Effect" is at least partially to blame.
Now that’s changed. Up until this point the most recent data we had to draw on was from 2015, but this week the FBI released their full statistics for 2016. The news is bad across the board in terms of the worst offenders. Murder, assault and rape were all ticking upward once again. As the Free Beacon reported yesterday, if these are the signs of the time, the signs are poor indeed.
Murder and violent crime rates increased significantly in 2016, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation records released on Tuesday.The good news, if there’s any to be had, is that some categories of property crime are way down. Burglary and larceny are at all time lows. Automobile thefts are up slightly but are still barely half of what they were in 1997.
The agency’s Crime in the United States report shows an increase of 3.4 percent in the violent crime rate from last year and a 8.2 percent increase in the murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate. It shows the violent crime rate, at 386.3 incidents per 100,000 inhabitants, is the highest since 2012. The murder rate, at 5.3 per 100,000, is the highest it has been since 2008. The same is true for rape with 29.6 per 100,000. The aggravated assault rate, at 248.5 per 100,000, is the worst it has been since 2010.
Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup" and links.
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