Footage has surfaced of the brutal beating of a Long Beach special education student.
The video showed several boys knocking another boy to the ground, before repeatedly kicking and punching him as he tries to shield himself from the blows.
Rasheena Mccord, the boy’s mother,
told the Long Beach Post that her son was attacked by a group of teenagers as he was walking home from school on Wednesday, May 15.
Mccord said her son tried to run away when the teens confronted him, but they caught up to him and beat him for several minutes.
*WARNING: graphic video
According to Long Beach police
cited by CBSLA, officers were called to an area hospital following reports of the beating.
Police said they were investigating the incident as gang-related.
The victim’s mother told the Long Beach Post that incidents of groups of teenagers attacking other teens have been on the rise in recent days.
She and other parents gathered on Monday in front of the Long Beach Polytechnic High School to call for school administrators and police to take action to protect their children from attacks.
Authorities have increased the frequency of patrols in the area, according to CBSLA.
Mccord said her son suffered scrapes, bruises, and a torn eardrum.
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,
reported 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 BJS’s CVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.
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, from 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
analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period in which the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.
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 (
pdf) 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
(pdf) done since 1996 believed that crime in their area had risen compared to the previous year.
