In an attempted murder-suicide case, a mother was killed and a father seriously injured while their three children and friends were inside their home in Detroit’s East Side on May 1.
The police said at the time of the incident early on Wednesday morning that there were eight people inside the home—a mother, father, their three children, two other women, and a child, reported ClickonDetroit.com.
Police believe that the man in his late 20s shot dead the 30-year-old woman before shooting himself at about 3:30 a.m., reported the Detroit News.
Their three children, all below 11 years of age were inside the home when their mother was killed.
The couple’s two female friends went to bed and woke up to the loud sounds of an argument and eventually gunshots.
When police arrived, they found the mother dead on the scene and the father critically injured. He was taken to the hospital and a weapon was recovered from the home.
Police said there were no signs of drug or alcohol abuse by the couple.
Facts About Crime in the United States
Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).
The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.
The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.
“From 1993 to 2017, the rate of violent victimization declined 74 percent, from 79.8 to 20.6 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older,” the U.S. Department of Justice stated in a 2018 report (pdf).
Both studies were based on data up to and including 2017, the most recent year for which complete figures are available.
The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, during the period of January to June 2018, the violent crime rate in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.
Rates of violent crime in the United States in 1993 compared with 2017, according to data from the FBI (L) and BJS (R). (The Epoch Times)
While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend.
Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, up from from 4.4, according to data collected by the FBI. The last two-year period that the rate of crime had soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.
Property Crime
The property crime rate fell by 50 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI, and by 69 percent, according to the BJS.
According to the FBI’s preliminary figures for the first half of 2018, property crime rates in the United States dropped by 7.2 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.
As with the figures for violent crime, the FBI survey only took into account crime reported to the police, while the BJS figures include both reported and nonreported crimes.
Public Perception About Crime
Despite falling long-term trends in both violent crime and property crime, opinion surveys have repeatedly revealed that Americans believe that crime is up.
The vast majority of Gallup polls taken since 1993 show that over 60 percent of Americans believe there is more crime in the United States on a national scale compared to the previous year.
Pew Research surveys show similar findings. A survey in late 2016 revealed that 57 percent of registered voters said crime in the nation as a whole had increased since 2008, despite both FBI and BJS data showing double-digit drops in violent and property crimes.
Perceptions differed on a national versus local level.
Surveys of perceptions of crime levels on a local scale showed that fewer than 50 percent of respondents in every single Gallup survey done since 1996 believed that crime in their area had risen compared to the previous year.
Venus Upadhayaya reports on India, China and the Global South. Her traditional area of expertise is in Indian and South Asian geopolitics. Community media, sustainable development, and leadership remain her other areas of interest.
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