I foolishly thought I could Google “national crime statistics” and easily find some useful, meaningful national crime statistics. But I kept digging and finally came to a site called “2008 Crime in the United States,” located on the FBI’s website. Even there, you need to click through a lot of links to find this now-out-dated information.
Essentially, according to that site, “an estimated 1,382,012 violent crimes occurred nationwide in 2008, showing a decrease of 1.9 percent from the 2007 estimate.”
I tried looking for 2009 stats, but they apparently haven’t yet been processed.
I got started on all this because we’ve had some news stories in recent weeks — and one nearly personal “close call” violent crime situation in my family’s case last summer — that started me wondering about violent crimes, property crimes, increased crime reporting, etc.
Personally, I don’t think crime and violence in general have gotten too much worse than when I was a kid. I think that REPORTING of crime and violence has gotten much better and much more widespread. But all that’s just my opinion.
What I do recall vividly is the nearby violent crime in our neighborhood last summer. For those of you living in larger cities where shootings, drive-by shootings, and all that other stuff is routine, this won’t mean as much, I suppose. But dinky on Springfield, Missouri, “Queen City of the Ozarks,” isn’t the sort of place where you expect gun violence in the streets. (Except for a rather historical shootout on our town square involving Wild Bill Hickok back in the 1860s.)
I heard three rapid “bang” noises one afternoon last summer, followed quickly by either two or three deeper, louder “boom” noises. My wife and I thought it sounded like it could be fireworks and that it may have come from somewhere quite a bit south of our home. I quickly peeked out from behind our “faux wood blinds” (i.e., plastic window shades) and looked in that direction, seeing nothing.
I went outside and saw my neighbor leaving his car and walking toward his front porch. He’d heard the noise, and both of us concluded it was probably fireworks or cars backfiring, or something.
As we were speaking about it, two police cars raced down the street and turned the nearby corner. Within a minute, an ambulance did the same thing.
We walked down to the end of the block and looked southward down the street. Cops, a couple of vehicles with one door swung open, and an ambulance were there. The cops were already putting up “crime scene” yellow tapes and neighbors were standing on their porches looking.
We discovered the next day that three people — two men and a woman, the woman being from a house in that block — were arguing in the two empty vehicles. One guy pulled a small caliber gun and started shooting. The other guy pulled a larger gun and fired twice, hitting and killing the first guy.
All of this happened in front of a house which has a backyard that abuts MY backyard.
It may be hard to pin down real, accurate, current national crime statistics. But I know now that’s a close as I ever hope to come to becoming a crime statistic!