The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/crime-trends/)
The spread of marijuana legalization may account for some of the decline, say the author of the study in the Addictive Behaviors journal. But they add more research is needed to understand the role that peer pressure and behavioral problems play in substance abuse disorders among young people.
Rural areas are suffering from a shortage of law enforcement and a dramatic increase in incarceration. The lack of policing is breeding crime.
Policing in the city has changed “very dramatically,” says Prof. Donald Norris of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. “The outcome … has been a lot more crime in Baltimore, especially murders, and people are getting away with those murders.” Officials acknowledge the change. “In all candor, officers are not as aggressive as they once were, pre-2015,” says acting Police Commissioner Gary Tuggle.
The city recorded 147 murders through June 30, an 8 percent increase from the same period in 2017. Reported rapes were up 33 percent in the same period. Policed officials said victims are more comfortable reporting rapes.
Journalists say the number of threats they receive has increased in recent years. The killing of journalists in the US is rare. The Committee to Protect Journalists lists 11 such deaths since 1992; the US now is the third-deadliest country for journalists in 2018, behind only Afghanistan and Syria.
A new murder was the city’s 71st of 2018, compared with 57 at the same time last year. Ten of the victims have been young people. A “violence reduction partnership ” is under way.
Researchers using Los Angeles Police Department data from 2000-2007 found that whites were less likely to be the victims of assaults by blacks and Hispanics, but more likely to be victims of robbery and weapons crimes by those ethnic groups.
By Monday morning, at least 56 people had been hit by gunfire in Chicago over the weekend. At least nine of them died. It was the worst weekend for violence in the city this year. More troubling, it was close to comparable weekends in 2016 and 2017, when gun violence hit levels not seen in Chicago in more than a decade.
Speaking to the National Sheriffs’ Association, Attorney General Jeff Sessions says a federal study showing that 83 percent of 60,000 state prisoners released in 2005 were arrested again within nine years is of “historic importance.”
The big-city crime rate last year declined slightly from the previous year, falling by 2.1 percent to remain at historic lows, says the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University in its final analysis of the data. Homicide rates in some cities are still higher than 2015 levels.