The Brennan Center for Justice of New York University’s faculty of law has just published an update of the future crime situation in the United States, carried out last September by teachers Friedman, Grawert and Cullen. This report predicted a certain level of crime stability and warned of the critical situation regarding violence in very specific cities. The new document updates and explains some of the points of the report as well as confirming the most relevant trends. Noteworthy points of this report are:

• The crime rate in the 30 largest cities in the country will have remained stable, with a slight rise of 0.3%. The fundamental factor for such low rates is the lower level of crime against property.
• Violent crime will have increased by 3.3% (and not 5.5%, as predicted in September). Increases of 23% in San Antonio, 17.7% in Chicago and 13.4% in Charlotte will contribute to this global rise. All over the country, however, this violence is at its lowest point for the last 30 years.
• The homicide rate could be 14% higher than the previous year in the country’s 30 largest cities. Once again the case of Chicago (a rise of 43.7%) will raise the general trade. Indeed, this is nothing new because back in 2015 a group of three cities (Baltimore, Chicago and Washington D.C.) accounted for over half the rise in the number of homicides.
• The city of New York would continue to have historically low rates of violent crime (545 per 100,000 inhabitants), a noteworthy drop of 2.3% compared with the previous year. Homicides will actually have gone down by 4.6% and have remained stable at 336, much fewer than the 2,000 in 1991, with a historic rate of below 4 per 100,000 inhabitants. In fact, if such data is confirmed, when police statistics are computed, the city of New York will have the second lowest homicide rate of the country’s 30 largest cities, only surpassed by Seattle, which has a forecast of 2.4 per 100.000 inhabitants.

The report concludes that there is no reason to believe that crime is out of control. Without making any direct reference, the report tries to counter some compromising information emanating from the latest presidential campaign, which spoke of an exaggerated increase in crime, due mainly to immigration.

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