Overall, the nation’s crime rate decreased by 6.5%, led by a 6.9% decline in the property crime rate. It was the 16th year in a row in which property crimes dropped, the FBI said.
The decline in overall crime continues a decadeslong trend but follows a two-year uptick in violent crime in 2015 and 2016 that raised concerns about the possibility of a broad shift in the pattern.
“This largely shows we are not standing on the precipice of a national crime wave,” Ames Grawert, senior counsel for the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said of the latest crime statistics.
A number of large cities that had significant increases in murders in recent years had fewer killings in 2018, according to the FBI data. In cities with populations of more than 1 million people, the murder rate fell by 8.5% in 2018, including 14% in Chicago and 9% in Baltimore.
But several large cities saw their murder rates rise in 2018, including Washington, which had a 36% increase, and Philadelphia, which had a 10% rise.
Although crime has continued to fall, the number of rapes reported in 2018 increased by 2.7%. It was the only violent crime category that rose last year, according to the FBI report.
Criminologists said it was not clear whether more sexual assaults were occurring or more people were reporting assaults amid the “Me Too” movement.
Further complicating the results, the FBI has revised the way it classified rape to include males as victims and to expand the definition of rape to include types of attacks not previously counted. Since the FBI changed its guidelines in 2013, the number of reported rapes has grown by more than 18%, according to the data.
A similar increase in rapes was documented in an annual National Crime Victimization Survey, which was released this month. That survey asked people if they had been victims of crime during the past year, regardless of whether they had reported the incidents to law enforcement.
This article originally appeared in
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