Violent crime rises in U.S.

Some experts complain about complacency.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- FBI statistics confirmed Monday what big cities such as Philadelphia, Houston, Cleveland and Las Vegas have seen on the streets: Violent crime in the U.S. is on the rise, posting its biggest one-year increase since 1991.
In Philadelphia, homicides jumped from 330 in 2004 to 377 in 2005, a 14 percent increase, according to the FBI. Slayings climbed from 272 to 334 in Houston, a 23 percent rise, and from 131 to 144 in Las Vegas, a 10 percent increase.
Jeffrey Sedgwick, director of the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, cautioned that it is not yet clear whether the FBI numbers reflect a real increase, or the ordinary year-to-year variations that statisticians call "static noise."
Sedgwick said it is possible that crime rates in the U.S. are approaching a floor below which it may be difficult or even impossible to go. "I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect you can always drive the crime rate down," he said.
Programs abandoned
Some criminal justice experts said the statistics reflect the nation's complacency in fighting crime. Crime dropped dramatically during 1990s, and some cities have since abandoned effective programs that emphasized prevention, the putting of more cops on the street, and controls on the spread of guns.
"We see that budgets for policing are being slashed and the federal government has gotten out of that business," said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. Still, Fox said, "We're still far better off than we were during the double-digit crime inflation we saw in the 1970s." The overall national increase in violent crime was modest, 2.5 percent, which equates to more than 1.4 million crimes. Nevertheless, that was the largest percentage increase since 1991.
Nationally, murders rose 4.8 percent, meaning there were more than 16,900 victims in 2005. That would be the most since 1998 and the largest percentage increase in 15 years.
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