NJ Walmart Evacuated Amid Reports of Masked Person With Gun

NJ Walmart Evacuated Amid Reports of Masked Person With Gun
An undated file photo of a Walmart store. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Jack Phillips
8/15/2019
Updated:
8/19/2019

A New Jersey Walmart was evacuated on Aug. 15 after reports of a masked person with a gun surfaced. Police later said the report of a shooter was “unfounded.”

Union Police said they are “monitoring the situation, and can not provide any details because it is an active investigation,” Patch.com reported.
Police evacuated the Walmart in Union Township near Springfield Road near Route 22, reported NJ.com.

Residents said that customers had left their shopping carts and ran out of the store, according to the report.

About 10 police cars were outside the location, another witness said.

Police in Union Township said they’re monitoring the situation, but they didn’t provide any details about the matter.

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) (pdf).

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.

The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.

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, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.

Jack Phillips is a breaking news reporter with 15 years experience who started as a local New York City reporter. Having joined The Epoch Times' news team in 2009, Jack was born and raised near Modesto in California's Central Valley. Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/jackphillips5
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