FBI Reports Huge Decrease In Murders

[RWC130 594]

NRA-ILA GRASSROOTS ALERT

Vol. 16, No. 51 12/30/09

FBI Reports Huge Decrease In Murders

As Firearm, Ammunition And "Large" Magazine Sales Soar

Last week, the FBI issued its preliminary 2009 crime report, showing that the number of murders in the first half of 2009 decreased 10 percent compared to the first half of 2008. If the trend holds for the remainder of 2009, it will be the single greatest one-year decrease in the number of murders since at least 1960, the earliest year for which national data are available through the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Also, the per capita murder rate for 2009 will be 51 percent lower than the all-time high recorded in 1991, and it will be the lowest rate since 1963 - a 46-year low. Final figures for 2009 will be released by the FBI next year.

Credit:

http://www.nraila.org/

[Guest alsfirefighter]

Ah...the grand old trend of the past several years of reporting how the murder rate in the country is down. Which is one of the biggest smoke and mirror statistics out there.

I wonder why they didn't mention what the stat on aggravated assaults has done. I wonder if it has increased yet again like it has steadily and rapidly since the mid 90's when reporting on the reduction in murder deaths every year has become some suave.

Why is the murder rate more then likely down? While some law enforcement efforts I'm sure always helps, the truth is often the aggravated assault rate goes up and the murder rate drops and much of it has to do with improved medical procedures and treatment as more person who get shot, stabbed, etc are surviving. This is documented in many articles and books about the topic.

Statistics are a wonderful thing and what I've quickly learned from the local to the federal level is that the ones you see are often the ones they want you to see.

[helicopper 1,050]

Too bad there's no national EMS agency or cabinet member to jump on this and cite the EMS system as the for the reduction in murders because as ALS points out, assaults certainly aren't decreasing!

[v85 212]

Another thing that many people don't realize is that when multiple crimes are committed in a single incident, only the most serious one is counted, and it is only counted once. So it is possible that at some of these active shooter incidents where there is multiple homicides, it only counts as one in the statsitics.

Long story short is I don't trust those numbers to be totally accurate.

[Guest alsfirefighter]

Another thing that many people don't realize is that when multiple crimes are committed in a single incident, only the most serious one is counted, and it is only counted once. So it is possible that at some of these active shooter incidents where there is multiple homicides, it only counts as one in the statsitics.

Long story short is I don't trust those numbers to be totally accurate.

I've also seen the opposite of this when it comes to arrests however where when a person say committed the above crime of an active shooter every charge counts as an arrest. So again the numbers can be skewed and also the codes used to input types of crime into UCR can be controlled again to play into statistics. If you want property values to stay up, you get your PD upper management to keep certain crimes underwrap or into a lower or lesser category that doesn't sound as bad or count against you. Or if you are a precinct or zone commander and don't want to get ripped if say burglaries or assaults are up in your area you change them to other types of indexes that don't reflect a huge jump in those stats.

Bottom line is that the murder rate is dropping. There are great aggressive programs in some urban areas where there were huge problems that have helped immensely in getting numbers down in certain areas like Jersey City, Detroit, etc. But the numbers of those areas don't explain the nationwide drop that is being told.