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Monday, October 16, 2000
Serious crime down for 8th straight year
Murder rate at 33-year low; big cities show least decline
By Michael J. Sniffen
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Serious crimes reported to police went down for an eighth straight year in 1999. The 7 percent drop extended the longest-running crime decline on record and pushed the murder rate to a 33-year low, the FBI reported Sunday.
The overall violent crime rate sank to a 21-year low - 525 murders, rapes, robberies and assaults for every 100,000 residents. The last time the figure was lower - 498 in 1978 - came well before an epidemic of crack cocaine sent violent crime soaring in the mid-1980s.
The murder rate was the lowest since 1966; 5.7 per 100,000 in 1999, compared with 5.6 in 1966. The FBI report contained a hint that big gains against crime may be about to slow down.
Big cities with more than 1 million residents showed the smallest decline in murder rate of any size community, down just 4 percent from 13.5 to 13 per 100,000. The largest, New York, saw murders rise, from 633 in 1998 to 671 in 1999.
"The big cities are reaching their limit" in crime reduction, said professor James Alan Fox of Northeastern University in Boston. The murder totals are considered the most reliable figures in the FBI report and a leading general indicator of crime.
"The big cities were the first to go up in the 1980s, the first to come down in the 1990s," said professor Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "Now, having the lowest murder rate decline suggests they'll be the first to stabilize. "
Nationwide, the rate and the number of all seven major violent and property crimes declined, despite an increase in the U.S. population, the FBI reported. The overall decline extended a trend begun in 1992 that is now almost three times longer than the second-longest decline, the three years from 1982 through 1984.
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