Charts are keyboard readable: focus a chart, then use the left and right arrow keys to step one reading at a time, hold Shift to step a year (ten readings on a yearly chart), Home and End for the first and last month, Escape to let go. In the timeline, tab to Window Start or Window End and use the arrow keys to move it.
Violent Crime Rate
About This Indicator
What Is the Violent Crime Rate?
Murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults known to police, per 100,000 people, from the FBI, which counted rape more broadly from 2013.
Why Does It Matter?
It is the broadest official count of serious violence, the kind that decides whether people feel safe on their own street. Serious assaults and robberies make up most of it and murders only a sliver, so it can drift apart from the Murder Rate.
Can Politics Influence It?
Mostly through states and cities, which run policing, prosecution, and prisons. Crime fell in 1990s Canada too, without an American-style prison boom, a caution against crediting any one policy for the American decline.
Key Idea
Only crimes known to police are counted, so the count depends on victims coming forward as well as on crime. A rise can mean more crime or more victims willing to report it.
Scored: A Faster Fall or Slower Rise Ranks Better
Source: FBI; Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics before 1979. Crime Data Explorer, estimated crimes for the nation, from 1979; Sourcebook Table 3.106.2012 for 1960-1978.
Loading the dataset…