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| Violent Crime Rate Lowest in Three Decades |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 12/10/2002 |
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The nation saw violent crimes except murder fall by 9 percent last year, marking the lowest level since the government began surveying victims in 1973. A record low number of reported assaults, the most common form of violent crime, was reported. The drop is detailed in the 2001 National Crime Victimization Survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which is based on interviews with victims and thus does not include murder. Preliminary figures from an FBI report -- gleaned from more than 17,000 city, county and state law enforcement agencies and released in June -- reflected an increase in murders of 3.1 percent in 2001. Specialists said the decade-long decrease in violent crime results mainly from the strong economy in the 1990s and tougher sentencing laws. 'When people have jobs and poor neighborhoods improve, crime goes down,' said Ralph Myers, a criminologist at Stanford University. 'Crime also has been impacted by the implementation of tough sentencing laws at the end of the 1980s.' Since 1993, the violent crime rate has decreased by nearly 50 percent. The report said that between 2000 and 2001, the number of people who reported they were victims of violent crime fell from about 28 per 1,000 to about 25 per 1,000. The number of people reporting violent crimes fell from 6,323,000 in 2000 to 5,744,000 in 2001. Only about half of the violent crimes counted in the survey were reported to police. The report showed a 10 percent decrease in the violent crime rate for whites. It also included an 11.6 percent decline for blacks and a 3.9 percent increase for Hispanics. However, those figures were not given the highest grade of confidence because of analytical formulas that suggest they could be flawed. Assault was down 10 percent, but victim reports reflected a 13 percent increase in injuries. The effect of tougher sentencing laws can best be seen in the drop in the rate at which people in the United States are assaulted, said Bruce Fenmore, a criminal statistician at the Institute for Crime and Punishment, a Chicago-based think tank. 'There is overwhelming evidence that people who commit assaults do it as a general course of their affairs,' Fenmore said. 'Putting those people behind bars drops the rate.' |
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