Crime Rates
As mentioned earlier, the media tends to show the most eye-catching crimes in order to gain viewership, but often the crimes portrayed in the media do not reflect the realities of victimization. We can talk about crime statistics in two different ways.
The first uses the raw number of crimes and victims to describe crime. If we look at crime in just raw numbers, we can get a very different picture than if we use crime rates. Because a small town might only have 25 violent crimes while a large city might have thousands, one might think that the small town is a lot safer than a large one. But this is not necessarily true. The raw number of crimes is not a good way for someone to compare two places, especially if they are not the same size. The odds of being victimized in the small town might be a lot larger.
The second way to look at crime uses a formula to determine crime rate. This is the term used when experts talk about crime because it provides a more statistically accurate view. The crime rate formula allows us to compare apples to apples in terms of crime to gain an accurate statistical picture of U.S. crime rates. For example, using this equation, we can see that the violent crime rate for Chicago is 58.9, while the violent crime rate for Tulsa, Oklahoma, a mid-sized city in the Midwest, is much higher at 82.9. Compared to the United States overall, which is 31.1, both of these places are high (FBI, 2016).
The crime rate is calculated as:
(# of crime incidents / total population in that area) x 100,000
In addition, it is important to look at long-range crime trends rather than year-to-year comparisons. In 2017, the gun violence victimization rate for the city of Las Vegas will look like a significant spike, but unless you give more context, it might be hard to realize this is due to a single incident.
Since the 1990s, the overall trend in violent crime has declined. The violent crime peaked in 1992 at 758.2 and hit a low in 2014 at 361.6. Today, we see about 400 fewer crimes committed than we did 25 years ago. Image: Violent Crime Rate in the U.S. Source: Barnes & Noble Education. License: CC-BY NC SA
Murder rate is based on the number of felony homicides that occurred in a place in any given year. Although the overall number of people who have been killed has increased, going from 9,110 victims in 1960 to 17,250 in 2016, the rate of murder is about the same as it was in 1960 (1960 = 5.1 to 2016 = 5.3). Murder peaked in 1980 with a murder rate of 10.8, staying between 8 and 10 throughout the 1990s, and began falling in 1996 (FBI, 2016).
Although most people would expect places like New York and California to have the highest murder rate, it was in fact Louisiana that had the highest murder rate in the United States in 2010. Image: Murders in the U.S. by State, 2010. Authored by: Delphi234. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_US_Murder_Rate_in_2010.svg. License: CC-0
Other violent crimes, like robbery, have followed similar trends, with a peak rate of 272.7 (672,480) in 1992. By 2016, there were 332,007 robberies, with a rate of 102.8. Larceny, which has always been the most common crime that we use to look at crime rates in the United States, peaked in 1991 with 8.1 million (a rate of 3,228) larceny thefts, and in 2016 there were 5.6 million (a rate of 1,745), which is similar to the 1960s (1966 was a rate of 1,746).