For the third straight year, the rate of serious crime in the US showed little change, dropping by 1.1 percent last year, according to an annual count issued on Monday by the FBI.
The number of murders increased over 2001, by 1 percent, the Uniform Crime Report said. But that number was down almost 34 percent from a decade earlier, reflecting an enormous drop in crime in the 1990s.
"The main fact now is that the trend is impressively flat," said Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University.
Blumstein, other experts and law enforcement officials said they were a little surprised that the crime rate did not rise last year, because a number of factors might have led to an upturn.
These included a poor job market, especially for young people; the diversion of police resources to fighting terrorism; budget deficits that caused cutbacks in social services and prisons; and a growth in the number of young people at the prime age for committing crime.
"These factors make it a significant achievement to hold the line on crime rates," said James Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University.
The FBI count, whose statistics are drawn from reports to state and local law enforcement agencies around the country, measures four violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) and four property crimes (burglary, larceny, auto theft and arson). It does not measure drug crimes.
This year's report includes two special chapters on crimes that have recently captured public attention: bank robberies and sniper shootings.
With a great increase in the number of bank branches in recent years and with tellers instructed not to resist, banks have become a frequent target of criminals. The number of bank robberies showed a sudden jump in 2001, rising to 10,150 from 8,565 in 2000, the report found.
But the average amount of money taken in bank robberies was less than US$5,000, the report said, and the robbers had guns in only 32 percent of cases.
The other special chapter found that from 1982 to 2001, there were 327 incidents of murder that law enforcement officials classified as firearm sniper attacks, with 379 victims. Handguns were used 63.6 percent of the time, rifles 22.9 percent and shotguns 7 percent.
Overall, the report said, the rate of violent crime fell 2 percent last year, while property crime declined 0.9 percent. The South had the highest total crime rate, the Northeast the lowest.
While the crime rate was essentially flat last year, there were sharp differences from one city to another, Blumstein said. St. Louis, Missouri had the largest drop, a decline of 25 percent. But Oakland, California had an increase of 29 percent, the report showed. New York continued its string of years with a large decrease in murders, which dropped 11 percent, to 587.
Los Angeles and Chicago had the largest number of murders: 654 in Los Angeles, 647 in Chicago.
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