WASHINGTON – Violent crimes unexpectedly
jumped 18 percent last year, the
first rise in nearly 20 years, and
property crimes rose for first time
in a decade. But academic experts said the
new government data fall short of signaling a
reversal of the long decline in crime.
The U.S. Bureau
of Justice Statistics reported Wednesday that the
increase in the number of violent crimes
was the result of an upward swing in simple
assaults, which rose 22 percent,
from 4 million in 2010 to 5 million last year. The
incidence of rape, sexual assault and robbery
remained largely unchanged, as did serious
violent crime involving weapons or
injury.
Property crimes were
up 11 percent in 2011, from 15.4
million in 2010 to 17 million, according to the
bureau's annual
national crime victimization survey.
Household
burglaries rose 14 percent, from
3.2 million to 3.6 million. The number of thefts
jumped by 10 percent, from 11.6 million to
12.8 million.
The statistics
bureau said the percentage increases last year
were so large primarily because
the 2011 crime totals were compared to
historically low levels of crime in
2010. Violent crime has fallen by
65 percent since 1993, from 16.8 million
to 5.8 million last year.
"2011 may be
worse than 2010, but it was also the second-best
in recent history," said Northeastern University
criminology professor James Alan Fox.
"These simple
assaults are so low-level in severity that they
are not even included in the FBI counts of serious
crime," Fox said. FBI crime data only
counts aggravated assaults.
The growth
in violent crime experienced by
whites, Hispanics, younger people and men
accounted for the majority of the increase.
Chris Melde, an
assistant professor at Michigan State University's
school of criminal justice, said: "you can have
percentage changes that seem quite large but
unless you put them in a longer-term perspective
you can sometimes misinterpret the overall
seriousness of the problem. I would caution
against forecasting future crime trends based
on a one-year fluctuation."
A retired police
chief says the growing number of assaults last
year may reflect a need by law enforcement to
spend more time and attention on what's happening
in the nation's schools.
"My experience
was that almost always, disputes started on campus
and the young people took care of them off-campus
with fists," said Jim Bueermann, president of the
Police Foundation, the country's oldest,
non-partisan, nonprofit police research
organization. Bueermann was the police chief in
Redlands, Calif., for 13 years.
Bueermann said
the bureau's crime victimization reports
can be a useful tool for police because "you get a
different snapshot that's just as valuable" as
looking at crimes which are formally
reported to police.
The victimization
figures are based on surveys by the Census Bureau
of a large sample of Americans in order to gather
data from those who are victims of crime. The
results are considered
the government's most
comprehensive crime statistics because
they count both crimes that never are
reported to the police as well as those reported.
Historically,
less than half of all crimes,
including violent crimes, are reported
to police.
Last May, the
FBI's preliminary crime report
for 2011, which counts
only crimes reported to police,
concluded that while crime dropped again
last year, the declines slowed in the last half of
the year. In the FBI report,
violent crime fell
6.4 percent in the first six months of
last year. But for the entire year, the decline
was much less, just 4 percent. The number of
reported property crimes fell
3.7 percent in the first half of last
year, but for all of 2011, went down just
0.8 percent.
The slowing of
declines in the second half of last year was seen
by some academic experts as a sign that the years
of falling crime levels might be nearing
an end.
"It will be
fascinating to see" the next FBI report, which
comes out at the end of October, said professor
Alfred Blumstein of the Heinz College of Carnegie
Mellon University.