FBI statistics on Monday confirmed what residents of big cities like Philadelphia, Houston, Cleveland and Las Vegas have seen on the streets: Violent crime in the US is on the rise, posting its biggest one-year percentage increase since 1991.
In Philadelphia, homicides jumped from 330 in 2004 to 377 last year, a 14 percent increase, according to the FBI. Murders climbed from 272 to 334 in Houston, a 23 percent rise, and from 131 to 144 in Las Vegas, a 10 percent increase.
Jeffrey Sedgwick, director of the US Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, cautioned that it is not yet clear whether the FBI numbers reflect a real increase, or what statisticians call "statistical noise."
Sedgwick said it is possible that crime rates in the US are approaching a floor below which it may be difficult or even impossible to go. "I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect you can always drive the crime rate down," he said.
Some criminal justice experts said the statistics reflect the nation's complacency in fighting crime. Crime dropped dramatically during the 1990s, and some cities have since abandoned effective programs that emphasized prevention, the putting of more cops on the street, and controls on the spread of guns.
"We see that budgets for policing are being slashed and the federal government has gotten out of that business," said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. Still, Fox said, "We're still far better off than we were during the double-digit crime inflation we saw in the 1970s."
In Philadelphia, which has had more than 160 murders this year, the police department has responded by creating a special unit charged with roaming the streets in the dangerous hours between 10pm and 3am. The program, which is expected to start soon, will shift 46 officers from other assignments.
Philadelphia police Captain Benjamin Naish said more people appear to be settling disputes with guns.
"I think that everybody continues to be frustrated within the government, within the department," he said. Philadelphia police have stressed that the number of killings is still below the averages in the mid-1990s and far below the 525 homicides in 1990.
The overall national increase in violent crime was modest, 2.5 percent, which equates to more than 1.4 million crimes. Nevertheless, that was the largest percentage increase since 1991.
Nationally, murders rose 4.8 percent, meaning there were more than 16,900 victims last year. That would be the most since 1998 and the largest percentage increase in 15 years.
Los Angeles and New York were among several big cities that saw murder numbers drop.
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