Property crimes decreased as murder, aggravated assault and violent crime overall increased.
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According to the statistics, in Spokane County, violent crime was down 11%from 2015, which includes murder, rape and robbery. In New Haven, violent crime fell 12% between 2014 and 2016. That translates to a homicide rate of 5.3 per 100,000 people.
Some specialists and analysts have debated the proposition noting that the crime levels had increased considerably a quarter-century ago indicating that current surge is not ubiquitous. According to the report, the property crime rate continued a years-long downward trend, decreasing 2% from 2015 to 2016.
Detroit wasn’t the highest in terms of murders though. While relatively small, those decreases came after both violent and property crime spiked in the city in 2015. In his inaugural address, he pledged to stop what he called “American carnage”.
Violent crimes reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, Humboldt State University, and the Arcata, Eureka, Ferndale, Fortuna and Rio Dell police departments rose 26.5 percent in 2016 from the year before, with 12 killings reported.
That’s mostly because of a disproportionate jump in large cities, where the murder rate jumped by nearly fifteen percent.
Still, violent crime was down 18 percent from 2007, while the murder rate also down 6 percent in that time.
Chicago alone accounted for about one-fifth of the national increase in murders, according to Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project at The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Nationwide, murder and non-negligent manslaughter spiked 8.6 percent last year, following a roughly 10 percent increase the year before.
To the south, Fremont, with a population of 236,000, provided more evidence of its emergence as one of the safest big cities in the nation, with not a single homicide in 2016. San Jose was next at 4.5. Atlanta’s population is almost double Savannah’s, the city seeing 5,000 violent crimes and 111 murders.
Alex Piquero, a professor of criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas, said it’s important not to jump to conclusions based on two-year trends.
Other big cities that saw significant hikes previous year included Baltimore and Las Vegas. “There seem to be very localized circumstances and situations that are driving the increase”, Pew’s Gelb said.
Comey led the FBI during the events in Ferguson, but was sacked by President Donald Trump in May, officially over his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email.
“The apparent majority of the uptick is due to some really troubled places where the rate is catastrophically high”, Weisberg said. “Then crime resumed dropping”.
But, as he was heading late Monday afternoon to a Neighborhood Watch meeting in Riverbank, he said, “early intervention, prevention and education, along with engaging the community by helping us through the Neighborhood Watch and other crime reduction efforts, will also have a positive net effect on property crime”.
Collectively, victims of property crimes (excluding arson) suffered losses estimated at $15.6 billion in 2016.
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The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting compilation for 2016 was released Monday, culling crime figures from more than 16,000 law-enforcement agencies throughout the country.
