Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 25, 1991 TAG: 9103250072
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
According to the National Crime Survey, which the Bureau of Justice Statistics has been compiling since 1973, combined personal and household crimes, not including homicide, declined by 3 percent to 34.8 million.
But the vast majority of the 1 million fewer crimes - almost 937,000 - were personal larcenies that didn't include any contact with the victim. The total of such crimes declined to 11.6 million.
"Larceny without contact would be bicycle thefts, other relatively minor thefts, whereas the issues of greater concern are moving up," said Alfred Blumstein, dean of the School of Urban and Public Affairs at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Steven Dillingham, director of the bureau, acknowledged in a statement accompanying the report that the overall decrease "results largely from last year's 8 percent decline in the rate of personal thefts without direct contact between the victim and the offender."
Rising last year were assaults completed with injury, attempted robbery and personal larceny that involved contact with the victim.
And although the survey found a drop in the number of rapes, the figures are in dispute.
The survey lists only information provided by victims, so homicides, which hit a record of more than 23,000 last year, aren't included.
The number of completed violent crimes rose 3.4 percent, to 2.3 million, the survey found. The increase was also reflected in a 2.4 percent rise in the rate of violent crimes, which meant 11.2 of every 1,000 people age 12 and older were the victims of such a crime.
That includes almost 6 percent increases in the number of aggravated and simple assaults that injured victims. There were some 1.5 million such victims last year.
The estimates in the survey are based on questions asked by Bureau of the Census interviewers, who contacted 97,000 people in 48,000 homes and asked about crimes they experienced during the previous six months. The estimates also take into account actual police reports.
The survey found rapes declined 18.3 percent, to 110,660, last year. That would reflect a 19.1 percent decline in the rate, to 0.5 per 1,000 people.
In addition, the survey said 69,410 of the rapes - almost 63 percent - were reported to police.
That would be a huge percentage for a crime that traditionally has been tremendously underreported to police and is surprising considering interviewers found that, for all the offenses they were told about, reports to law enforcement averaged only 38 percent.
But Blumstein said the NCS rape statistics "are the least reliable because they get so relatively few of them that just year-to-year sampling variations can make that fluctuate dramatically."
by CNB