The drops came across categories of violent offenses,
including murder, non-negligent manslaughter and robbery, and property crimes
like burglary, larceny and vehicle thefts, while aggravated assault numbers
remained about flat. The rate for rape bucked this trend however, up slightly
for 2018, and in each of the last six years.
The overall numbers, recorded by police departments across
the country and compiled annually by the FBI, are welcome news for crime
researchers like Ames Grawert, who closely monitored an uptick
in violence in 2015 and 2016.
“That's a really good sign that the long term trend towards
greater safety is not in fact reversed, and that we’re moving past whatever
happened in 2015 and 2016,” said Grawert, senior counsel with the Brennan
Center for Justice, a research institute at New York University’s School of
Law. “It’s a reminder that two years isn’t a trend, and two years doesn’t break
a trend.”
Mostly fueled by a spike in homicides in a handful of large
cities, the nation’s violent crime rate increased by 3.3 percent in 2015 and
3.5 percent in 2016 before dropping. Some opponents of criminal justice reform
seized on the two-year uptick as proof of what they called a new cresting crime
wave. Then-Attorney
General Jeff Sessions said in early 2017 that his “best judgment” was
that these data represented a “dangerous permanent trend.”
That spike also fueled the emergence of the so-called
“Ferguson Effect” hypothesis, that the Black Lives Matter protest movement had
prompted demoralized police officers to cut back on proactive policing
strategies in response to scrutiny from the general public. Then-FBI director
James Comey described it as “a chill wind blowing through American law
enforcement.”
University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist Richard
Rosenfeld, who authored several studies on the spike, has found that something
akin to a “Ferguson Effect” likely did contribute to increased murder rates in
a handful of cities, like Chicago and Baltimore, but that the “demoralized
cops” explanation was unsupported by the data. A study
he co-authored in March found “no evidence” that arrest rates had any
effect on homicide rates in the cities and time period examined, a correlation
one would expect to see if a dip in proactive policing was really to blame.
“The uptick in homicide was more likely associated with a
crisis in police legitimacy: People, especially in disadvantaged minority
communities, drawing even further back from the police,” Rosenfeld told The
Marshall Project. “There is an avalanche of research right now in criminology
pointing in that direction, that declining legitimacy is associated with
increases in crime.” Predatory violence might increase, for example, because
offenders believe victims and witnesses will not contact the police to report
incidents.
Violent crime did not decrease across the board in 2018,
however, and one category is in the midst of a slow but persistent six-year
upward swing: rape. For the 2013 statistics the FBI changed
its outdated parameters of rape—then defined as the forcible “carnal
knowledge of a female”—to a more modern definition structured around consent,
rather than force. Ever since, the rate has been on a steady surge, up more
than 18 percent in that period.
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