When it comes to our cities, our urban centers here in North America, crime is as much of a problem as it is elsewhere, although our crime rates seem to be higher than is found in other westernized nations, such as Western European nations and Japan. There are always reasons for crime, these reasons can change over time, and the punishments for these crimes can also change. As urban centers learn the reasons behind different crimes, their governments purposely try to develop the means to combat them. And, as these governments try to establish laws, policies, and social programs to combat crime and its causes, it also tends to trigger controversy, as people and organizations disagree with the policies, politics, and monetary appropriations directed towards social programs meant to combat those crimes.
What is Crime?
So, what is crime? Crime is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “an act or the commission of an act that is forbidden or the omission of a duty that is commanded by a public law and that makes the offender liable to punishment by that law; especially : a gross violation of law” .
A legal definition of crime would be: “a violation of a law in which there is injury to the public or a member of the public and a term in jail or prison, and/or a fine as possible penalties. There is some sentiment for excluding from the “crime” category crimes without victims, such as consensual acts, or violations in which only the perpetrator is hurt or is involved in something such as the personal use of illegal drugs.”
Major Crimes and Their Statistics
So, what are the biggest violent crimes in America’s urban areas today? What are the crimes of which Americans need to be the most cautious? They include murder, nonnegligent manslaughter, aggravated assault, rape, drug possession or selling, robbery (which includes burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft, and will be explained later), and arson.
So, how much crime occurs in America, particularly America’s largest metropolitan areas, which would include your own metropolitan area of choice? According to the FBI records, 1,203,808 violent crimes were committed in the year 2019, which went down 0.5% from the previous year, or went up 0.4% from 2015, and was down 3.8% from 2010. This is 366.7 violent crimes per 100,000 people in the United States that year. Of those violent crimes committed in 2019, 68.2% of them, or more than 2/3 of them, were aggravated assault. Further breakdown showed that 22.25% of those crimes, or almost 1/4 of them, were robbery; forcible rape was only 8.2% of that total, and murder accounted for only an estimated 1.4% of that amount. FBI statistics also show the prevalence of firearms in the use of committing many of those crimes, as 73.7% of the nation’s murders, almost 3/4 of the total, were done by a firearm, as was 36.4% of robberies, and 27.6% of aggravated assaults.
As for property crimes that year, there were an estimated 6,925,677 property crimes committed in America, coming to 2,942 property crimes per 100,000 people, a 4.1% drop from the previous year, a 15.6% drop from 2015, and 28.4% less than 2010. Larceny-theft (theft outside of the home) accounted for 73.4% of all property crimes in 2019, which is almost 3/4 of all property crimes. Burglary (inside the home) accounted for 16.1% of that rate, and motor vehicle theft accounted for only 10.4% of that rate. If the losses that property-owners incurred over the course of 2019 were added up, it would come to $15.8 billion.
When we look at a breakdown of crime by urbanization, we can look at the FBI data to see a comparison between metropolitan counties versus nonmetropolitan counties, that is, between an urbanized setting and a rural setting. Just by looking at the crime rates per 100,000 people, we can tell that there is a higher crime rate in urbanized settings, with a higher population, versus rural settings, with a lower population. In 2019, if you look at cities with a population of 250,000 or more people, there were 715 violent crimes per 100,000 people, and 3,079 property crimes per 100,000 people. In cities with populations of between 100,000 and 250,000 people, violent crime was done at a rate of 451 per 100,000, and property crime at a rate of 2,704 per 100,000. Suburban areas had a violent crime rate of 243 per 100,000, and a property crime rate of 1593 per 100,000. In nonmetropolitan counties, that is, rural counties, the violent crime and property crime rates were the lowest at 208 and 991 per 100,000 people. This would seem to suggest that crime rates increase with population size.
Although the statistics usually show higher crime rates in urban areas as opposed to rural areas, we find that the opposite is sometimes true – a nonmetropolitan county with a population under 10,000 had a higher violent crime rate than a metropolitan county with a population higher than 100,000 – 296 per 100,000 vs. 266 per 100,000 people. The same can be said for the rate of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, with the rate being 3.5 per 100,000 people in metropolitan areas above 100,000 people, and being 6.4 per 100,000 people in nonmetropolitan counties below 10,000, which means you’re twice as likely to get killed in a rural nonmetropolitan county than in an urban metropolitan county with a population above 100,000.
The other statistical breakdowns showed some significant differences between urban counties and nonurban counties, in the other five areas. The robbery rate was 50.4 per 100,000 for metropolitan counties over 100,000, whereas it was only 6.6 per 100,000 for nonmetropolitan counties under 10,000, which is a substantial difference. Aggravated assault was 301.6 per 100,000 for metro counties with a population under 25,000, but for non-metro counties between 10,000 and 25,000, about the same number of people, it was only 135.8 per 100,000 – it appears that the same number of people living in a rural environment rather than an urban environment reduces the probability of aggravated assault by half. Property crime as a whole, as well as larceny-theft and motor vehicle theft occurred in greater frequency per 100,000 people in metro counties versus non-metro counties.
The previous information comes by way of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, which publishes annual data on crimes that have been reported to the police, but not on those crimes that haven’t been reported to them. The other major place where we can get crime data is from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, or BJS for short. BJS does things differently than the FBI – they field a large annual survey each year of Americans from the age of 12 and onward, and ask them whether they were the victims of a crime in the previous six months – this is their approach to tracking crime. This approach allows them to capture both reported and unreported crimes.
Two Other Things…
Now, with this information, there are two other pieces of information that are relevant when it comes to crime.
First, there has been a dramatic decline in the United States in both violent crimes and property crimes since the time they reached a high in the early 1990’s. According to the FBI, between 1993 and 2019, the violent crime rate fell by 49%, which means it was almost cut in half. During that same time period, the robbery rate made a substantial decrease of 68%, not too far from a 3/4 decrease. Murder and non-negligent manslaughter dropped by 47%, almost half, and aggravated assault dropped by 43%. Property crime fell by 55% during that same time period, which is more than half. Burglary fell by 69% and motor vehicle theft fell by 49%. BJS statistics show a similar substantial decline in crime. All of this appears great, right?
Second, the year 2020 saw all of those downward trends reversed, most likely due to the effects of Covid on society, as well as the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on causing law enforcement to back off in the most crime-ridden of places, causing a type of negative feedback loop between the two issues. Because of this, in 2020, violent crime was up 3.3%, or 5.8% in large cities, and the national homicide rate grew by a substantial 25%, with most of that increase coming from our big cities, in places that are populated predominantly by black people or other minority groups, and which are under the control of the Democratic party and its policies. And this year, in 2021, those rates are only expected to increase even more substantially. Property crime, on the other hand, despite all the protests last year, and the destruction of property those protests led to, were still overall down 7.9%.
Anyways, these are the two other important pieces of information that you should consider when having conversations about crime, types of crime, and how much of it takes place and where.
