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FBI Crime Report Shows Increase In Metro-Phoenix, Despite National Decline

While the number of violent and property crimes saw a slight decline across the country last year, a recently released FBI report shows the results were different in Arizona.

Data has shown that in some of Arizona’s largest cities, there has been an uptick in murders, violent crime, and property crime.

Michael S. Scott, a clinical professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University said it isn’t surprising that the Arizona trends differ from the nationwide findings. The reasoning is due to the fact that there can be many variations in crime types included in the annual report vs. those in towns and cities, as does the reporting method between certain agencies and the FBI. 


“We’ve seen years in which murder was down significantly in some major cities and up in others,” Scott said in an email. “Local conditions (social, environmental, economic) largely dictate crime levels rather than national factors.” 

The violent-crime rate was 392.9 offenses per 100,000 residents last year across the United States, down 0.9 percent from the year prior, according to the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report. The property crime rate was 2,362 offenses per 100,000 residents, which was a 3.6 percent dip from 2016. On a broader spectrum, crimes captured in the report remain at some of their lowest levels in decades.

The UCR crime summary, which is released every September, tracks particular offenses from the previous calendar year including murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

The reports and offenses do not include specific details such as race, gender and relationships of the involved victims and offenders. Also not included is the specific information about where the crimes take place and which specific weapons are used. For law-enforcement officials and lawmakers, the lack of this information keeps them from being able to construct more effective anti-crime strategies. 

With the flawed reporting method and lack for information, authorities and analysts are led to question the reliability of what is measured and reported. It is even more troubling to trust a possibly flawed method that determines how hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money is spent to increase public safety.

While murders can be considered as the offenses tracked most consistently in the report, there are numerous additional crimes that are often committed in the process that aren’t recorded. Reporting limitations that have been in place for decades only track the most serious single offenses from one particular incident, even if numerous other crimes were committed. 

It has been stressed by the authors of the report, along with Scott, that the data shouldn’t be used to compare cities due to numerous other factors that cause a variation in the nature and crime types.