Crimes Known to Police Continued Decline in 2019

The FBI has released its annual final report on crime for last year, Crime in the United States, 2019. Nationwide, the rates per 100,000 population decreased 1% for violent crime and 4.5% for property crime. This data set does not include crimes not reported to or otherwise known to the police. As we have discussed on this blog previously, the change of many crimes from felonies to misdemeanors is likely to decrease reporting as the police are less likely to take any worthwhile action.

As noted last year and in multiple previous years, California has not fully shared in the national crime decline in property crime since it started its decarceration project.

California’s decline in violent crime was a tad above the national total this year, at 1.4%, but the drop in reported property crime was only 2.3%, about half the national drop. The latter trend has been fairly consistent since the state embarked on a drive to eliminate most consequences for the supposedly harmless criminals who break into people’s homes or who steal their cars for “chop shop” rings. See this post, with graphs, from two years ago.