Murder rate drops nationwide and in Florida; other crimes down
By Associated Press
Published October 18, 2005
WASHINGTON - The nation's murder rate declined last year for the first time in four years, dropping to the lowest level in 40 years. Experts said local rather than national trends were mostly responsible.
The rates for all seven major crimes were down and the overall violent crime rate reached a 30-year low, according to the FBI's annual compilation of crimes reported to the police.
In Florida, the reported crime rate fell 3.3 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2004, a decline of almost 10,000 crimes, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement announced on Monday.
Crime in Florida has been dropping for more than a decade and at the end of 2004 had fallen to the lowest rate in 34 years. Officials generally credit the trend to tougher sentencing laws and increased prison terms for violent criminals. Many criminologists agree, but say that other factors including the economy, demographic shifts, changes in drug policy and policing practices are also at work.
Among crimes tracked by state officials, murder was among those that dropped the most in the first half of this year. The homicide rate in the first six months of 2005 was down 10.5 percent from the first half of 2004.
Some types of crimes did increase. Forcible rape, forcible sodomy and aggravated assault all went up, leading to a slight increase - 0.6 percent - in the violent crime rate. Nonviolent crimes dropped 3.9 percent in the period.
State officials trumpeted a drop in reported domestic violence offenses, which were down 2.4 percent in the six months.
Nationwide, there were 391 fewer murders in 2004 than the year before. The total of 16,137 worked out to 5.5 murders for every 100,000 people.
"The declines are relatively small compared to larger, steady drops in the 1990s, and the results are by no means the same across the country," said professor Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
"We're not seeing important national trends like the shrinking of crack markets in the 1990s," Blumstein added. "These are responses to local situations, changes in local drug markets and shifts in gangs."
The four major violent crimes - murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assaults - declined nationwide from 1.38-million in 2003 to 1.37-million in 2004. That produced a 2.2 percent drop in the violent crime rate to 465.5 crimes per 100,000 people - the lowest since 1974, when it was 461.1.
The three major property crimes - burglary, auto theft and larceny-theft - declined from 10.42-million to 10.33-million in 2004. That pulled the property crime rate down 2.1 percent to 3,517.1 crimes per 100,000 people. These crimes produced an estimated loss of $16.1-billion, down 5 percent from 2003.
Rape was the only one of the seven crimes to show a numerical increase, up 0.8 percent to 94,635 offenses, but the rate of rape declined 0.2 percent to 32.2 per 100,000 people.
The FBI data were compiled from reports to more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies, representing 94.2 percent of the nation's population. The Justice Department has found that barely half of all violent crimes and less than 40 percent of property crimes are reported to the police, but its surveys of crime victims, which also track unreported crimes, show trends similar to those among the reported crimes tracked by the FBI.
