Crime Data in the United States

One thing that is overwhelmingly clear in current events in the United States is that many people do not understand crime data. For example, many people believe that in metropolitan cities, Chicago for instance, violent crime is on a sharp rise, which gives the impression that we're not as safe as we once were. I've put together a collection of data which I've attempted to make easy to understand for the express purpose of helping people to understand the error in thinking this way. We as people are have a bad habit of thinking that things we hear about often are things which happen very often - like how we believe that because we hear about terror attacks so frequently we must be in constant danger of being killed in a terror attack, which just is not true. This having been said, let's take a look at some information.

There is an important point to be made about these data: violent crime is on an overall decline in the US, as it is in many many places. Over the span of only 22 years the number of total violent crimes has decreased by 442,473. Unfortunately, this number probably isn't easy to understand or picture, so let me try to explain. What this means is that over the course of about one generation we've reduced crime by about the population of Sacramento. This means that every year the number of people equivalent to the population of Sacramento is not the victim of a violent crime, whereas if the crime rate had remained constant, that number of people more would have been.

In case you're wondering if this general trend remains constant over the whole spectrum of violent crimes, yes it does. The number of Murders, Rapes, Assaults, and Robberies have all decreased in connection with one another. The rate of murder throughout the whole US was about 0.0087% in 1989. As of 2011, it's been reduced to 0.0047%. Rape has gone from 0.038% to 0.027% in the same time frame. Robbery has seen a huge reduction, going from 0.234% to only 0.114%. Remember, all of these numbers come from the World Almanac from 2014. This is not partisan, nor is it cherry-picked.

I know, seeing numbers do not make some people feel safe about the state of the world or the country, but please remember my purpose in doing this is mainly to highlight how much worse the world could have been if we hadn't acted and improved our societies and communities over time.