Violent crime, murder rate rising across US: FBI
The number of homicides and other violent crimes is rising in the United States, with statistics showing that 2016 had the largest single-year increase in 25 years, according to new data by the US government.
There were an estimated 17,250 murders in the US in 2016, up 8.6 percent compared to 2015 and more than 20 percent higher than the 2014 levels, according to the FBI's annual crime statistics released Monday.
Overall violent crimes — murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — increased by 4.1 percent in 2016, after rising by 3.3 percent in 2015, the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting data shows.
The spike in violent crimes, the largest for a two-year period since US crime rates peaked in 1991, is fueling concerns that the United States is in the midst of a fresh violent crime spree following two decade of falling crime rates.
The US Department of Justice, which administers the FBI, said the report "reaffirms that the worrying violent crime increase that began in 2015 after many years of decline was not an isolated incident."
"Could it be a trend? Absolutely," said John Pfaff, a Fordham University law professor and statistician. "But it certainly doesn't confirm it's a trend in one way or another."
The increases in violent crime were seen across much of the country, with cities large and small reporting rises. Chicago and Baltimore, the country's two most violent cities, accounted for 15 percent of the increase in the number of murders in the US.
"It suggests that it is a national trend and not just a thing we can blame on Chicago or something we can blame on Baltimore," said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst based in New Orleans, Louisiana. "It is happening in a lot of American cities."
US President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have highlighted the rise in violent crime over the past two years to argue for tougher policing and other law enforcement policies. Sessions has vowed to confront what he called "the rising tide of violent crime in America."
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