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US crime remains at 30-year lows

The rate of property crime and violent crime other than homicides remained at a 30-year low last year, the Justice Department said Sunday.

Statistics on the homicide rate are gathered more slowly, but they appear to be following a similar trend. In the most recent year for which statistics are available, 2002, there were 16,200 homicides, up 1 percent from 2001, the Justice Department said.

The government report did not cite causes for the statistics or predict trends.

"There is probably no single factor explanation for why the crime rates have been going down all these years and are now at the lowest level since we started measuring them in 1973," said Lawrence A. Greenfeld, director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

"It probably has to do with demographics, and it probably has to do with having a lot of very high-rate offenders behind bars."

The low crime rate is continuing despite the deployment of many law enforcement officers to anti-terrorism duty in the last three years. Greenfeld said he had not seen any evidence that diverting some police resources to security had had any effect on the crime rate.

The results form the National Crime Victimization Survey, based on interviews with people in 84,000 households, and show a steady decline from 1993 until 2002 in the rates of violent crime and property crimes, and then a leveling-off.

The number of victims of violent crimes for last year was 22.6 per 1,000 people, down from 49.9 in 1993.

Personal crimes included rape and sexual assault, attempted rape, robbery, assault and personal theft.

The number of victims per 1,000 people was mostly unchanged for all those crimes except for rape and sexual assault, which showed a marginal decline last year, the report said.

The rate of property crimes was much higher but also declined. Last year, it was 163.2 per 1,000 people, down almost 49 percent from 1993.

Those crimes included household burglary and motor vehicle theft.

Homicides are at the lowest rate since the 1960s, Greenfeld said. And the percentage of violent incidents involving a firearm also declined, to 7 percent last year, from 11 percent in 1993.

The survey only counts victims over the age of 12.

Rates for last year and 2002 were the lowest since the survey was first taken in 1973, the department said.

Rates dipped in the mid-1980s, climbed in the early 1990s and then dipped again.

The department's statistics differ markedly from those collected by police departments because they are based on a survey of US residents and include crimes that were not reported.

In fact, only 48 percent of violent crimes, and 38 percent of property crimes were reported, according to the report.

"The willingness of victims and witnesses to report both violent and property crimes to the police has significantly increased over the last decade," the department said in a statement.

Greenfield said that technology was also playing a role in driving down crime rates, because police agencies could communicate better with one another.

"The record systems we have now are so far superior to what we've had in the past," he said. "Even police deployments are much more effective, because they're data based. We're mapping now to look at certain kinds of incidents, and manpower is deployed much more appropriately than in the past."
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