LITTLE ROCK — The FBI released its 2010 preliminary crime report on Monday, which estimated a five percent drop overall in violent crime for the second year in a row. Violent crimes are identified as murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault.
The FBI slices and dices its data in numerous ways. In the national aggregate, the FBI predicted reductions in every single violent crime category, but of course some states saw increases in some categories and decreases in others.
The same is true of cities, as evidenced by our own capital city’s representation in the report. Both murders and forcible rapes in Little Rock were down from 2009 by 17 and 15 percent respectively, but robberies rose seven percent and assaults six percent.
So all the “Crime is down!” headlines didn’t necessarily apply to Little Rock (or New York City, and several others), which is always the case with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, which are anything but uniform.
The greater misfortune is that while crime is ostensibly down nearly 11 percent over the past two years, it is far from low-but you wouldn’t know it from the published reactions of criminology experts.
James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, termed the latest drop “remarkable.”
“There is only so much air you can squeeze out of a balloon,” he said.
“It’s been so huge, there’s always been this lingering question, how low could it go?” asked Michael Jacobson of the Vera Institute of Justice.
How about as low as, say, 1965? That was only a couple of generations ago, for heaven’s sake, but in terms of violent crime, it is worlds away from the so-called “low” rates these experts are dumbfounded over.
It’s not hard to see this same illogic playing out over the coming years with our national debt. Once we get accustomed to living with $15 or $20 trillion in debt looming over us (or more accurately, our posterity), the news focus will shift away from those days when $1 trillion was considered too much debt.
Instead, it will be headline news when the national debt dips five percent, and experts will marvel aloud over the drop from $20 trillion to $19 trillion-while never acknowledging the good old 1990s when our debt was counted in the hundreds of billions.
How low can crime go? It baffles me that criminologists are baffled by small drops resulting in rates that are still two, three and even four times what they were in 1965.
Crime rates are independent of population, so the 58 percent increase in U.S. population between 1965 and 2010 has nothing to do with how many people per 100,000 commit violent crimes.
The national violent crime rate according to the FBI is now the lowest it’s been since 1974. Which sounds like pretty good news, until we’re reminded that the 1974 rate was almost three times what it was in 1960, and more than twice the rate in 1965.
Then, as now, the national rate was an average. There were many states in 1965 whose violent crime rate was a fraction of the national rate. Arkansas was one of them.
There’s nothing wrong with nodding in approval that a five percent drop in violent crime is a step in theright direction. But there is everything wrong with giving the public the impression that the crime rates of today are acceptable, perhaps even better than should be expected.
The expectation ought to be that each state should get back to where it once was, prior to the enormous spikes in violence that occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s.
How low can crime go? It’s enigmatic that leaps in the most barbarous crimes followed several important milestones toward higher civilization reached in the mid-60s.
Those years saw big strides in individual opportunity and development as Congress passed laws advancing civil rights, higher education and health care. Few would dispute today that, on the whole, our population has more education, a higher standard of living, access to more information and a more uniform understanding of civil rights than in 1965.
If anything, the reasonable expectation then would have been that violent crime would go down as the population’s overall sophistication went up.
Yet the rate at which citizens rape, rob and assault other citizens today is still double what it was then. In some unfortunate states, like ours, the rates are triple (for robbery) and quadruple (for rape and assault).
Forget the national figures for a moment, and consider only Arkansas. We were a low crime state in 1965, with a violent crime rate 32 percent below the nation’s. Categorically, Arkansas’s murder rate was higher, rape was about the same, and robberies and assaults were both much lower.
In 2009, Arkansas’s violent crime rate was 21 percent higher than the national rate-and the forcible rape rate in Arkansas is almost twice as high.
We shouldn’t pine for the truly low violent crime rates of 1965-we should demand them.
Dana D. Kelley is a free-lance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 05/25/2011