U.S. Violent Crime Rates Rise But Remain Near Historic Lows: FBI

U.S. violent crime continued to rise in the first half of 2016 after ticking up the previous year, according to a report released Monday from the FBI. Property crime, however, has dropped slightly.

This increase is largely isolated to cities. While violent crime increased 6.3 percent in metropolitan counties, areas outside of the city only experienced a 1.6 percent increases on average.

Overall, violent crime rose 5.3 percent, while property crime dropped 0.6 percent.

Larger cities were the hardest hit. In areas with a population of 1 million or more, violent crime increased 9.7 percent.

This data comes from more than 13,000 law enforcement agencies across the country that submitted their data to the FBI for January through June. Violent crime includes murder, non-negligent manslaughter, rape, aggravated assault and robbery.

The violent crime rate has steadily declined over the past decade and a half. However, the recent rise in rates, while still modest when put in the context of long-term patterns, raises concerns about whether the country's downward trend in serious offenses will continue.

At the same time, year-0n-year fluctuations in crime rates are expected, even if the broader trend remains intact. And as the crime rates gets lower, small increases will seem bigger, because they represent a larger portion of the total amount of crime.

(Data for 2016 not yet included)

Even as the violent crime rate increased, there's a lot of variation in the data. For example, though overall violent crime rose in New York City from the first half of the year of 2015 to 2016, the murder rate dropped slightly. According to data from the NYPD, there were 335 murders in all of 2016, down from 352 the previous year.

More strikingly, in 1990, there were 2,262 murders, when the city had a million fewer residents.

Some cities, however, are seeing much worse trends. The FBI's data shows that total murders in Chicago jumped from 213 in the first half of 2015 to 317 in the first half of 2016. This is nearly a 50 percent increase, almost matching the total rate of murders in New York city for all of 2016, in a city with about a third the population.

"The pattern for homicide is very uneven," said Franklin Zimring, a law professor at University of California-Berkeley, noting that much of the change comes from Chicago and a few other large cities.. "The property offenses in the aggregate don't increase."

In other words, it's hard to draw a clear national picture of what is happening with the crime rate.

Eugene O'Donnell, a lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, took a different view, citing the role of more reluctant policing in the light of recent criticism as a factor in the recent increases.

"The police profession is in crisis, having great difficulty recruiting and many officers leaving departments either prematurely or as soon as they are eligible," he said in an email.

"Getting the police to avoid conflict with citizens has been celebrated when, in fact, creating policing that responds to citizen complaints and is aimed at proactivity was quite an accomplishment in major cities like LA, NYC and Chicago," O'Donnell continued. "In many places, the police are simply not solving serious crimes, finding it less controversial to do the paperwork, check the boxes and move on to the next case."

Photo credit: m01229 via Flickr