Police in Ohio have arrested an illegal alien accused of kidnapping and raping a 15-year-old New Jersey teen.
Juan Carlos Morales-Pedraza, 33, was taken into custody after an Ohio State Highway Patrol (OSHP) officer initiated a traffic stop on April 16 over an apparent traffic violation, WTOL reported.
Morales-Pedraza, who authorities said entered the United States illegally, is accused of kidnapping the victim in Paterson, New Jersey, and of sexually assaulting her.
A state trooper stopped Morales-Pedraza on the Ohio Turnpike for a failure to move over violation, police said, according to the report.
“During the stop, OSHP says the officer noticed a young female riding with an older male,” the Ohio State Highway Patrol said in a statement.
Neither Morales-Pedraza nor the victim were able to communicate in English, according to the report. It was only after police entered the teen’s information into a database that they discovered she was listed as missing.
Besides living in the U.S. illegally, the suspect had also been previously deported, according to state officials cited by WTOL.
Morales-Pedraza was booked into the Lucas County Jail.
Ariyl Onstott WTOL discussing OSHP’s rescue of a possible human trafficking victim:
Posted by WTOL NEWS 11 on Wednesday, April 17, 2019
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.
Both studies are 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, 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.
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, 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.
Property Crime
The property crime rate fell by 50 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI, and by 69 percent according to 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 violent crime, the FBI survey only takes into account crime reported to the police, while the BJS figures include reported and nonreported crime.
Public Perception About Crime
Despite falling long-term trends in both violent crime and property crime, opinion surveys repeatedly show 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 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.
Methodology
The BJS National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is the nation’s primary source of information on criminal victimization.
According to the BSJ, data for the NCVS is obtained annually from “a nationally representative sample of about 135,000 household interviews, composed of nearly 225,000 interviews of persons within those households, on the frequency, characteristics, and consequences of criminal victimization in the United States.”
The NCVS collects information on crimes both reported and not reported to police.
The FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report (UCR) is based on crimes reported to police in approximately 18,000 jurisdictions around the country.
“The UCR Program compiles data from monthly law enforcement reports or individual crime incident records transmitted directly to the FBI or to centralized agencies that then report to the FBI,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
