Violent Crime Down In IL, But Property Crimes Spike: FBI Report

ILLINOIS –Violent crime was down significantly in Illinois in 2022, according to new FBI crime data released Monday by the agency.

Nationally, violent crime was down slightly, by 1.7 percent to pre-pandemic levels according to the Crime In the Nation, 2022 report from the FBI. In Illinois, violent crime dropped by 20 percent according to FBI data.

At the same time, however, property crimes — especially auto theft — rose considerably, by 7.1 percent nationally and by nearly 2 percent in Illinois, with more than 181,000 property crimes reported in Illinois in 2022, the FBI said.

The report comes with a caveat. In the past, the annual snapshot of crime in the United States has been criticized as missing data from some of the country’s largest cities, including New York and Los Angeles. For the 2021 report, for example, only 62.7 percent of agencies representing just 64.8 percent of the U.S. population submitted data.

In Illinois, data was reported by 520 law enforcement agencies across the state as opposed to just 373 agencies in 2021.

A change in collection methods helped, and this year, the data represents 83.3 percent of all agencies whose jurisdictions cover 93.5 percent of the population.

Last year was the second in a row that violent crime went down, a big turnaround from the 29 percent increase in the murder rate in 2020, a year of huge pandemic-related social disruption and upended support systems.

Richard Rosenfeld, a criminal justice professor emeritus at the University of Missouri-St. Louis told The Associated Press the drop in violence can be attributed largely to the fact that the “stresses and strains” associated with the pandemic have abated.

“By and large, what we’re seeing is simply a return to something approaching normal after the big changes associated with the pandemic,” Rosenfeld said.

Violent crime includes murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, aggravated assault and robbery. The biggest dips nationally were in homicides (6.1 percent) and rape (5.4 percent). Aggravated assaults decreased by 1.1 percent, and robbery was up by 1.3 percent.

In the most recent 2022 report, the violent crime rate was 380.7 per 100,000 people. That’s statistically the same as the pre-pandemic 2019 violent crime rate of 380.8 per 100,000 people.

In Illinois, there was a violent crime rate of 287.3 per 100,000 people, which was significantly lower than in 2021, when the same rate of violent crime came in at 344.8 per 100,000 people, according to the FBI data.

The data offers a snapshot of gun violence in America. Firearms were used in 80.3 percent of murder and manslaughter crimes. And, although violent crime was down overall, the number of crimes committed with one or more guns was up 0.6 percent to 488,900 in 2022, according to the data.

Also, more minors were shot in 2022 than in the year prior. Both fatal and non-fatal gun injuries decreased for adults, but among juveniles, fatal gun violence increased by a staggering 11.8 percent, from 1,300 to 1,500. The number of non-fatal gunshot incidents for juveniles was also up 10.67 percent, from 61,800 to 68,300.