FBI report: City’s murder rate down, but violent crime up

Decreasing trend continues over 20-year period

Murder rates are up this year — but not in Houston.

Despite two years of elevated murder rates nationwide, slayings here are down even though violent crime as a whole is not.

That’s all according to the FBI’s annual crime data dump, a meaty report released every fall through the agency’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. It’s a treasure trove of statistics for data-lovers, but criminologists warn against drawing too many conclusions about crime patterns from the newly released findings.

“It’s about trends, not an anomaly of one year or six months or six weeks,” said Larry Karson, a criminal justice assistant professor at the University of Houston-Downtown.

And despite some alarmist responses to national data, crime is still trending down in the long run, experts note.

Nationwide, murder and non-negligent manslaughter spiked 8.6 percent last year, following a roughly 10 percent increase the year before. In the 2016 data, Chicago alone counted for roughly 20 percent of that increase.

And that’s important, said Ames Grawert, counsel for the Brennan Center’s Justice Program.

“It suggests that what we’re seeing nationwide might not be a nationwide crime wave, which some have falsely suggested,” he said.

The actual number of violent crimes as a whole went up 4.1 percent across the country, while Houston saw a slightly higher 8.9 percent increase. In 2016, the violent crime rate in Houston was 1,026 crimes per 100,000 residents.

“I think any increase in violent crime is a tragedy, but you want to put things like this in context,” Grawert said.

Despite the recent spike, the violent crime rate in Houston is still down 12 percent since 2006, and the murder rate is down 29

percent following a short but sudden increase in the mid-2000s. In 2015, the number of murders hit a five-year high with 303 killings, but in 2016 they fell to 301.

With both killings and armed robbery on the downswing, most of the increase in violent crime was driven by a rise in rapes and aggravated assaults.

“Houstonians shouldn’t be concerned about any uptick in violent crime, because when you look at the data over 20 years, it has been dropping,” Karson said. “An uptick by itself without further information as to the cause means little.”

For some criminologists, the murder rate is considered a more reliable metric than the violent crime rate, as it’s harder to fudge murder numbers, and slayings rarely go unreported.

The same cannot be said of crimes like rape and robbery.

Although 2016 saw a spike in reported rapes — 224 more than the year before — Police Chief Art Acevedo warned earlier this year that reporting in the Latino community had plummeted in 2017.

Even so, earlier this month, the Brennan Center put out a report predicting an 8.8 percent increase in the violent crime rate in 2017, coupled with a 20.5 percent decrease in the murder rate.

Yet despite some shifts, the FBI report didn’t offer any shocking revelations for Houstonians.

“It doesn’t look to me like it’s an appreciable change in anything,” Grawert said. “So it’s largely status quo.”