The FBI published, at the end of September, the 2016 edition of the report (Crime in the United States – CIUS), with statistics corresponding to crime known to the police in this country, referring to events taking place last year. The largest amount of crime corresponds to crime against property, 7.9 million crimes involving robbery and theft (71.2%), burglaries (19.1%) and vehicle theft (9.7%). These crimes against property in general see a drop for the fourteenth consecutive year, although the three typologies of vehicle theft increased by 7.4%.
The most noteworthy data is the increase, for the second consecutive year, of violent crime. Specifically, by 4.1% amounting to over 1.2 million crimes. The most common are assaults (64.3%), followed by robbery (26.6%), sexual assault (7.7%) and homicides and murder (1.4%). Equally noteworthy is the fact that homicides and murder have increased by 8.6% compared with 2015 (when they had already increased by nearly 11% compared with 2014).
The data published not only refers to these seven penal crimes, but also offers information about the following:
- Arson
- Theft of goods
- People trafficking
- Hate crime
- Arrests
- Police force numbers
- Police officers killed or assaulted
The report CIUS has, since June 2017, co-existed with the portal of data exploration of crime (Crime Data Explorer – CDE), which offers this data both to police forces and the general public. As a consequence of this, with the two resources (CIUS and CDE) and the modernisation of tools, those responsible for the CIUS have decided to reduce the number of databases published, maintaining 29 of the previous 81, as this may be due to the fact that they provide different information or because they are more frequently consulted.
It must be remembered that the FBI does not directly gather the data, as different police forces (whether at municipal, county, university, state and federal level) introduce their statistics in a national system. This system is presently in a process of change and, for this reason, details of the data that can be consulted on the CDE is different for each state.
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