LITTLE ROCK — Another September, another FBI statistical crime report. And, once again, it delivers nothing of statistical significance.
Headlines may hype the fact that the overall violent crime rate for 2008 was down by 2.7 percent over 2007, but it's down only 1.9 percent since 2004. This year's report essentially just confirms that the nationwide crime spree that began 50 years ago is still in full swing.
The FBI Web site includes a roadblock warning against comparing data from state to state, but where is the pop-up window putting things into perspective? What good is a rate without any context? The FBI statistics say crime was slightly better last year and barely better than five years ago. What they don't say is that crime is off the charts compared to pre-1960s America.
A sea change such as we've seen in violent crime in a couple generations ought to demand some answers. Instead, our premier law enforcement agency merely tallies incident reports from 18,000 local outfits and spits out a slight rehash of last year's hyper-violent, ultra-criminal snapshot.
Just for kicks, let's take a look back at the old faded Polaroid from 1960. The overall crime rate was only 1,887 per 100,000 population; the violent crime rate was only 161. No violent crime category-murder, rape, robbery, assault-crested 100 incidents per 100,000 population. Most tellingly, the violent crime rate represented only 8.5 percent of the overall total.
What happened next is statistically mind-boggling. The crime rate more than doubled in the ensuing 10 years. Today we count yearly variations by low single digits and point approvingly to a 1.9 percent drop. By contrast, the violent crime rate averaged an annual increase of 13 percent from 1960-70.
The next decade saw more of thesame. The violent crime index per 100K population, which had exploded from 161 in 1960 to 364 in 1970, soared again to 597 in 1980. Calculating the 20-year totals, America saw its violent crime rate jump by an almost unfathomable 271 percent.
By the time kids born in 1960 were graduating high school, violent crime had almost tripled and was increasing far faster than the property crime rate. As those kids were turning 30 with careers and their own families, property crimes had actually fallen, but violent crime kept climbing. Looking at the peak year of 1991, the violent crime rate was almost four times what it had been in 1960 (and the 20 yearsprior).
What's worse, the crime profile shifted ominously. The portion of overall criminal activity represented by violent crimes increased by 52 percent.
So not only were there many, many more crimes,but they were of the more violent variety.
Unfortunately, the crime story in Arkansas exceeded the rueful national experience, and continues to do so today. In 1960, the state enjoyed an overall crime rate that was nearly half of the national rate. The violent crime rate was about two-thirds of the national figure.
But unlike the national statistics, Arkansas saw consistent leaps in both property and violent crime rates. By 1990, both rates had grown almost four times. Some individual categories in Arkansas such as aggravatedassault increased by as much as fiveand-a-half times.
And unlike the falling national averages, because Arkansas started out beneath them to begin with, our state crime rates today remain at near-record highs: Our violent crime index in 2008 is 467 percent higher than it was in 1960.
Basically, both the nation and our state went from a relatively low, unchanging crime rate for the 25 years leading up to 1960 to a nearly unrecognizable high-crime landscape in 1991-and beyond. That's the real news you should be reading whenever the FBI releases the latest crime figures. Neither the nation nor the Natural State has come close to recovering from the violent crime wave that descended on us starting in the 1960s.
Lost in the FBI's report is the fact that the percentage of violent crimes among overall crimes is almost the same as the peak year of 1991: 12.4percent in 2008 vs. 12.9 percent then. The violence of our criminals hasn't dropped at all. Isn't that worth at least a sidebar?
We seem to have lost our collective memory about how low crime rates used to be. Or perhapswe've just lost our will to ever have that quality of life again.
Go ahead, pop a champagne bottle over the FBI's reported 2.7 percent drop in the violent crime rate last year. Take care not to notice in the fine print that the 10-year period (1999-2008) averaged a more modest 1.3 percent.
At that rate, it'll only take us another 270 years to get back to where we were in 1960. Cheers!
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Dana D. Kelley is a free-lance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial, Pages 21 on 09/25/2009