To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility

Appendix 5 contains statistical tables that document many statements in the text.

There have been declines in fear and violence since about 1993 in the United States.

However, Table 1 shows responses to one of the primary questions on fear that has been asked in national surveys from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. By this measure, fear has increased when we compare the late 1960s to the late 1990s.

Tables 2 and 3 show violent crime rates per 100,000 as measured by reports to the police that then are reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In the text, we refer in particular to the FBI "violent crime Index" -- the rate per 100,000 population of murder, forcible, robbery and aggravated assault combined. From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, this rate has gone up. As discussed in Chapter 2, part, but not all, of the explanation of the rise is due with changes in the procedures for how these crimes were reported.

When just murder is broken out in these FBI tables, the rate per 100,000 has gone down slightly from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. But this is so despite enormous increases in the prison population, and despite the very significant medical improvements in our ability to keep people from dying if they are badly hurt in an assault. The picture is considerably more troubling, moreover, if we look at murder trends among different age groups. For though murder deaths have fallen at all ages from the 1990s peak, they remain much higher for the young than they were in the era of the Violence Commission. Among 14-17 year olds, the risk of death by murder was almost half again as high in 1998 as in 1970, despite a sharp fall since 1993. For those aged 18-24, the situation is worse: their homicide death rate remained nearly twice as high in 1998 as it was in 1970. Long-term reductions in murder have come entirely among people over 25. In addition, in 1999, murder increased by about 10% in New York City, which has received so much attention over recent years of decline. See Chapter 2.

Table 4 shows trends in violent crime based not on police and FBI reports, but on the National Victimization Survey (NVS). In this alternative way of measuring crime, people in a national sample of households are interviewed about their victimization, and crime rates then are calculated. The Table 4 NVS statistics show an increase over time in forcible rape and a decline over time for robbery and aggravated assault. The NVS only began in the 1970s, so we do not have the late 1960 base years we have with the FBI measures.

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