Safety In Numbers

Like Ugg boots, pessimism is a trend that won't go away quick enough. There seems to be a growing sentiment that everything is getting worse. Modern days are painted as dangerous and awful where as the past is looked at through rose colored glasses. Have you noticed the past is always talked about like a fairy tale where cities were safer and people were nicer. It was Oz and we were Dorothy. However the past might not be as nice or as safe a place as you remember it being. After all kind hearted Dorothy was being hunted by an evil blood thirsty witch. In fact statistics prove that crime rates in the this country have actually been on a steady decline for years. Life is actually getting better.

To help prove my point I did some research and pulled real crime stats. Reading an online article can be informative but you can never really know how completely accurate the information is and therefore I wanted to get the data directly an official source. (Wikipedia was not used at any point for this post) In this case the source was the FBI. Their crime statistic website was very helpful and provided all the information I needed and more. I decided to make it easy and start 20 years ago. In the last 20 years there have been Republican presidents, Democrat presidents, a national terrorism tragedy, an economic boom, and an economic bust. It seemed like a good span of time to study due to all those changing variables. The most current data on the FBI's website was for 2012 so I looked back to 1992. As you can see crime has been dropping for some time. (All number are US only statistics)

Violent crime totals

1992: 1,932,274

2012: 1,214,464

Robbery totals

1992: 672,478

2012: 354,522

Motor Vehicle Theft totals

1992: 1,610,834

2012: 721,053

Aggravated Assault totals

1992: 1,126,974

2012: 760,739

Murder and non-negligent manslaughter totals

1992: 23,760

2012: 14,827

I know our country isn't problem free and there is still plenty to worry about but at least you can rest easy that we are actually creating a safer place for new generations.





*It should also be noted that in 1992 the US population was 255,029,699 and in 2012 it was 312,780,968.

All date can be found at  http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/index.cfm and click on Table Building Tool to get this information or more in depth date. There you can also get state specific numbers.