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.
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.
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).Both studies are based on data up to and including 2017, the most recent year for which complete figures are available.
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.
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.
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.Perceptions differed on a national versus local level.
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.
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