Survey: Violent Crime Rate Plunges
WASHINGTON (AP) - The violent crime rate declined by 10.4
percent last year, the largest one-year drop in the 26-year history
of the government's largest crime survey, the Justice Department
reported Sunday.
The property crime rate fell 8.9 percent from 1998 to 1999,
according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics' national crime
victimization survey.
The survey estimated there were 28.8 million violent and
property crimes in 1999, the lowest figure since the survey was
begun in 1973, when it found an estimated 44 million crimes.
The violent crime rate decline began in 1994. The decline in the
overall property crime rate extends back a quarter of a century -
to 1974, the statistics bureau said.
The declines were no surprise - either in the short- or
long-term.
As with earlier, similar reports, President Clinton called the
figures ``further proof that the Clinton-Gore administration's
anti-crime strategy of more police on our streets and fewer guns in
the wrong hands has helped to create the safest America in a
generation.''
At Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush's
headquarters, spokesman Ray Sullivan said, ``It's typical for the
Clinton-Gore administration to take credit for good things in
America but ... much of the credit for the decline in crime has to
go to governors and local officials who have passed tougher laws,
longer prison sentences and lowered parole rates.'' As governor of
Texas, Bush started toughening criminal and juvenile justice laws
shortly after taking office in 1995, Sullivan said.
Academics have cited a wider set of causes, including the aging
of Baby Boomers past the crime-prone years, a subsiding of the
crack cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s, antigun campaigns by
local police and federal gun controls, crime prevention programs
aimed at young people, and a healthy economy producing jobs.
``While these numbers are heartening, there is a great deal more
work to be done,'' Attorney General Janet Reno said.
The 1999 survey figures confirmed preliminary FBI figures for
1999 released in May. The FBI data showed the total of seven major
violent and property crimes reported to police dropped for an
eighth consecutive year in 1999, down 7 percent from the year
before.
The statistics bureau's survey is the government's broadest
measure of crime because it is based on regular interviews
throughout the nation with more than 77,000 people over age 11.
Thus it collects data not only on crimes reported to police but
also on the larger number that go unreported.
The FBI data is based on reports made to 17,000 police agencies
around the country.
Last year, 44 percent of violent crimes were reported to police,
and only 34 percent of property crimes, the statistics bureau
found. The most frequently reported crime in the survey was motor
vehicle theft; the least reported was personal theft.
Murder, by far the least frequent but best reported of major
crimes, shows up only in the FBI reports, because the statistics
bureau records only crimes reported firsthand by victims it
interviews.
The survey estimated that last year there were 32.8 violent
crimes for every 1,000 Americans over age 11, down from 36.6 in
1998. The largest previous one-year drop from was from 10.04
percent from 1994 to 1995, when victimizations declined from 51.8
to 46.6 per 1,000.
Property crimes were estimated to have declined from 217.4 per
1,000 people in 1998 to 198.0 in 1999.
The survey found that overall, 54 percent of violent crime
victims knew their assailant in 1999.
Almost 7 out of 10 rape or sexual assault victims could identify
the offender as an acquaintance, friend, relative or intimate. At
the opposite end of the scale, just under half the victims of
aggravated assault and only one-third of the robbery victims knew
their assailant.
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