FBI: Homicides Down 6% in 2018 over 2017

The big rise in murders after The Establishment went nuts over Ferguson and Black Lives Matter in 2014 contributed to Donald Trump becoming President.

So far, crime is down a little under Trump’s first two years versus the sharp rise in Obama’s last two years. The FBI announced its official 2018 crime stats this week. From the FBI:

September 30, 2019
FBI Releases 2018 Crime Statistics
For the second consecutive year, the estimated number of violent crimes in the nation decreased when compared with the previous year’s statistics, according to FBI figures released today. In 2018, violent crime was down 3.3 percent from the 2017 number. Property crimes also dropped 6.3 percent, marking the 16th consecutive year the collective estimates for these offenses declined.

In 2018, there were an estimated 1,206,836 violent crimes. The estimated number of three violent crime offenses decreased when compared with estimates from 2017. Robbery offenses fell 12.0 percent, murder and nonnegligent manslaughter offenses fell 6.2 percent, and the estimated volume of aggravated assault offenses decreased 0.4 percent.

So homicides, the crime category that I pay most attention to, was down 6.2 from 2017, which saw a slight decline from 2016, after an increase of over 24% from 2014 to 2016. 1001 fewer people died of homicides in 2018 (15,498) than in 2017 (16,499).

So, to put this in crime scene terms, the new EMTs in the White House have stopped the bleeding, but the body politic isn’t close to being as healthy as he was before The Establishment’s giant own goal over Ferguson.

However, keep in mind that the number of homicides attributed to a year seems to go up over time as missing persons are found in shallow graves, as people in comas die, or as events get reclassified (e.g., the doctor who injected Michael Jackson with a powerful sleep drug was at times charged with a type of negligent homicide and at other times MJ’s death was considered not a homicide. I don’t recall the final outcome).

My guess is the decline from 2017 to 2018 will likely be seen as having been a little smaller in a year or two, just as the increase from 2014 to 2016 has grown from about 20% to over 24%.

The estimated volume of rape (revised definition) offenses increased 2.7 percent.

Nationwide, there were an estimated 7,196,045 property crimes. The estimated numbers for all three property crimes showed declines when compared with the previous year’s estimates. Burglaries dropped 11.9 percent, larceny-thefts decreased 5.4 percent, and motor vehicle thefts were down 3.1 percent.

Property crimes are way down from the bad old days. In 1988 I bought a new Honda Accord in the base model (no AC, no power windows or locks, no automatic transmission) mostly to avoid getting a radio, because having a radio in your car in Chicago in 1988 meant you’d spend a lot of money over the years getting your smashed windows replaced. Once my wife broke down and bought a $10 transistor radio so she could listen to music when driving. Within days a car window was smashed and the $10 radio was gone.

Here are the FBI’s 2018 Murder Offender numbers. They have the usual problems with crime statistics with not doing a good job disentangling non-Hispanic whites from Hispanics. Most other government statistics work hard to distinguish between the two, but crime statistics remain murky. (“Other” in the race column includes American Indians, Asians, and Pacific Islanders.)

Leaving out the 4,821 “Unknown” cases, blacks account for 54.9% of murder offenders.

Because the blacker a city, the less likely a homicide case is to be closed (snitches get stitches), these figures might underestimate the black percentage of murder offenders.

On the other hand, it could be that more blacks on average get arrested per murder, due to pack behavior among black criminals while murder tends to be a solitary vice for whites, so that could push how that stats should be interpreted in a different direction.

Here are the FBI’s stats on single offender / single victim murders (I think these are cases where the mystery of who-dunnit has been resolved);

Despite all the frenzy in the media about black bodies being in danger from people who think they are white, whites accounted for only 8.2% of the offenders in murders of blacks (leaving out the small number, 74, of Unknown races). And a fraction of the 8.2% of murders by blacks are committed by people who are identified as Hispanic, not white, in other government databases.

Blacks accounted for 91.2% of the murders of blacks.

Blacks accounted for 15.8% of the offenders in murders of whites (including a lot of Hispanics), just under twice the white (and/or Hispanic) contribution to the murders of blacks. So, the two races in 2018 generally do a pretty good job of keeping most of their homicidal urges within their own races.

From the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate on Display™ Hate Symbols Database:

Numeric Hate Symbols
13/52 and 13/90

The number 13 used in conjunction with either the number 52 or the number 90 is a shorthand reference to racist propaganda claims by white supremacists against African-Americans to depict them as savage and criminal in nature.

In this numeric shorthand, the number 13 refers to the purported percentage of the U.S. population that is African-American. The number 52 refers to the alleged percentage of all murders committed in the U.S. that are committed by African-Americans. Some white supremacists use the number 50 instead of 52.

So that 13/52 ratio is totally unscientific, you dumb racists. For 2018, according to FBI statistics, the ratio is 13/55.

That comes out to being blacks about 8 times as likely to commit homicide as the rest of the population, so not quite an order of magnitude.