Everyone talks about how crime is up. It definitely has risen in some places — like Jackson, the Mississippi capital city that is struggling with one of the nation’s highest per-capita homicide rates.
Information from 2021 is not yet available, but a chart on TheWhyAxis website makes a compelling case that violent crime rates in 1980 and 1994 were a lot worse than today’s.
The chart is based on information from the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. It tracks the ages of people arrested for violent crimes — murder, “non-negligent” manslaughter, robber and aggravated assault — in 1980, 1994 and 2019. It eliminates population differences by measuring the arrests per 100,000 people.
The chart accompanies this editorial. If you look at it, there are some very obvious trends:
• There were far fewer people from age 12 to 63 arrested for violent crimes in 2019 than in the two earlier years. It’s not even close. Even if there’s been an increase in violent crime since 2019, it’s unlikely the country is approaching the number of arrests in 1980 — and today’s rates are nowhere close to those of 1994.
• 1994 was a busy time for law enforcement. The number of violent crime arrests that year is shocking. It helps explain why Congress and states passed all sorts legislation during that decade, such as truth-in-sentencing in Mississippi, to keep convicts in prison longer. The country had a serious problem with violent crime.
• 2019 also is different from the other two years in terms of the age of those arrested for violent crimes. The story quotes an official with The Sentencing Project, who noted that in 1980 and 1994, violent crime arrests were highest among 18-year olds. But in 2019, the peak is between ages 25 and 27.
This is partly because in 2019 there were a lot fewer 18-year-olds arrested for a violent crime. Nevertheless, given that much of the violent crime in America has tended to be “a young man’s game,” as TheWhyAxis put it, a rising age peak is troubling.
• One more item of note is an increase in violent crime in 2019 among people in their 50s and 60s. These are a far smaller number of cases than those in which teenagers and 20-somethings are arrested. But the arrest rate for those 50 and older was lowest in 1980, second lowest in 1994 and highest in 2019.
Violent-crime arrest rates in 2019 for those aged 30 to 45 also were higher than in 1980. Sociologists and criminologists could have a field day explaining this kind of information.
This certainly is not the definitive word on crime rates in 2022. For one thing, what about cases where no one got arrested? And the chart excludes non-violent crimes like burglary.
There’s little doubt that, whatever the statistics say, people are worried about crime. It does make a good case against defunding the police. Freedom means nothing without safety.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
