Murders dropped in 2017, FBI says

The numbers suggest the rise of violent crimes in recent years may be ending.

The number of murders and other violent crimes dipped slightly in the United States last year, according to new crime statistics released Monday by the FBI. The numbers suggest that the rise of violent crimes in recent years may be ending.

Rapes rose 3 percent in 2017, according to the data, while cases of manslaughter and murder decreased 0.7 percent compared with the previous year. Aggravated-assault cases increased 1 percent, while overall violent crimes dropped 0.2 percent.

The figures suggest that a rise in violent crime starting in 2015 may have begun reversing itself in 2017. In 2014, there were 1,153,022 violent crimes, which climbed to 1,250,162 such crimes in 2016. Last year, that figure dipped to 1,247,321, the FBI said.

The declines announced Monday come after the increases in violence in 2015 and 2016 prompted alarm nationwide, including from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who warned of "the rising tide of violent crime" across the country. Experts have cautioned against reading too much into annual data, while others have pointed to the dramatic decline in crime over the last quarter-century in arguing for criminal justice reforms.

"Crime declined nationwide last year, consistent with our earlier analyses of 2017 data in the nation's 30 largest cities," Ames Grawert, senior counsel in the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, said in a statement. "That's the good news. The bad news is that even while crime is falling, the number of Americans incarcerated remains at near-record highs. Now is the time to address the problem."

The Brennan Center reported in an analysis earlier this year that violent crime and murder had dropped in the 30 largest U.S. cities, although some cities still had homicide rates lingering above the levels recorded in 2015.

Violent crime and murder have both plummeted since the 1980s and 1990s, federal data show. In 1991, the violent crime rate was 758.2 per 100,000 people, while the murder rate was 9.8 per 100,000 people. Last year, the violent crime rate was 382.9 and the murder rate was 5.3, the FBI data showed.

However, even as violent crime has dropped overall, the issue still plagues some cities - as does a lack of arrests in many homicide cases. A Washington Post analysis of decades of data from the 50 largest cities found that many had a lower homicide-arrest rate now than a decade earlier. The overall homicide-arrest rate in these 50 cities was 49 percent, but numerous places see frequent murders and have pockets where these killings result in far fewer arrests.

The FBI data released Monday found that firearms were a common factor in violent crimes, with guns used in more than 7 in 10 murders nationwide. Once again, the South had higher violent crime and murder rates than other regions of the country. The FBI found 17,284 murders last year, down slightly from the 17,413 reported a year earlier.

In Chicago, a city frequently singled out for its levels of gun violence, police say the numbers of shooting victims and murders have declined this year. But the level of violence is still ticking up in some major cities, with homicides up in Washington and Philadelphia as of Monday, according to police data.

According to the FBI data, less than half of violent crimes - 45.6 percent - were "cleared" in 2017, meaning they involved cases where someone was arrested and charged or the case was closed some other way, including the death of the attacker.

The FBI's crime data are based on information provided by thousands of state and local police departments, and officials have been working since 2016 to improve the types of data collected.

"With richer data," said FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement, "we can more easily identify crime patterns and trends, understand how and why certain crimes are happening, and find the best way to prevent them."

Each year, more city police departments adopt the more detailed crime-reporting system. The FBI say the new standards should be nationwide by 2021.