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Violent Crime in the U.S. Decreased Slightly in 2017, FBI Finds

Violent crime in the United States decreased slightly in 2017, after a troubling rise the previous two years that became a major talking point in the presidential election.

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Violent Crime in the U.S. Decreased Slightly in 2017, FBI Finds
By
Karen Zraick
, New York Times

Violent crime in the United States decreased slightly in 2017, after a troubling rise the previous two years that became a major talking point in the presidential election.

FBI statistics released this week showed that the rate of overall violent crime decreased by 0.9 percent, and the murder rate decreased by 1.4 percent. The rate of property crimes also declined, by 3.6 percent.

A separate analysis released last week, by the Brennan Center for Justice, also projected that overall crime and murder rates would decline even further in 2018.

The numbers remained stubbornly high in some places. Chicago, which has been battered by a high rate of violent crime for years, saw killings fall by 14 percent, to a total of 653. Ranking cities by murder rate — murder and nonnegligent manslaughter per 100,000 inhabitants — it came in at No. 10.

The much smaller city of St. Louis occupied the top spot, with 205 murders. In second place was Baltimore, where murders rose slightly from the previous year, to a total of 342.

The total estimate of murders nationwide was 17,284. Of those, 46 percent occurred in the South, 23 percent in the Midwest, 20 percent in the West and 11 percent in the Northeast.

Those estimates are based on data from more than 16,000 law enforcement agencies across the country.

In a statement, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the general downward trend was encouraging.

“But our work is not done,” he said. “While we have made progress, violent crime and drug trafficking continue to plague our communities and destroy the lives of innocent, law-abiding Americans.”

Overall crime has been steadily decreasing for the last 30 years in the United States. Inimai Chettiar, director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center, said the FBI’s statistics — and her organization’s own projections — showed that the rise in crime in 2015-16 was most likely a blip in that trajectory, not the start of a crime wave.

President Donald Trump campaigned on a get-tough approach to rising crime and spoke of “American carnage” in his inaugural address. In his statement, Sessions credited his administration’s approach to policing and criminal justice with bringing down the crime rate.

But Chettiar disputed that, adding that much of the work of fighting crime is done by local officials, not at the federal level.

“There’s no evidence that what Trump and Sessions are doing led to this decrease,” she said.

The Brennan Center looked at crime data from the 30 largest U.S. cities in the first half of 2018 and then modeled its projections based on the previous year’s patterns.

Its report predicted that the murder rate in the 30 largest cities would fall by 7.6 percent by the end of 2018, with sharp drops in San Francisco, Chicago and Baltimore. The report’s authors say their data has tracked closely with national trends in previous years.

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