Summary:
- Crime has fallen dramatically in the nation as a whole, and in North Carolina specifically
- Rural counties continue to suffer from higher crime rates than urban ones
- Suicide continues to be an epidemic, particularly in rural counties
By Miles Kirkpatrick, Research Associate
It seems that every election season, without fail, some politicians discover – some in hysterical terms – reporting about crime rates. Violent crime is an attractive issue for opportunistic politicians, because while it’s quite rare in day-to-day life, it’s ubiquitous in TV and movies, and thus very easy for most people to imagine. The news media does not report, and people generally do not notice, low rates of crime. In fact, partly because most Americans live in a low-crime society, the muggings, robberies, or even homicides that do occur are given that much more attention.
Because of this mismatch between how much we fear crime versus how often it actually occurs, it is easy and common for politicians to claim that crime is “out of control.” Fortunately, this isn’t true – neither in North Carolina, nor in America generally. In fact, nearly every category of crime is far less common today than it was just a few decades ago. The general trend since the 90s has been a dramatic decrease in both property and violent crimes, even with some small increases around the pandemic era. This includes North Carolina, where crime has declined fairly consistently.
Crime in North Carolina
According to statistics from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, the overall incidence of violent and property crimes has fallen steadily over the last decade in our state. The overall count of reported crimes is down 23.2% since 2013, from 335,899 reported in 2013 to 258,017 reported in 2022, the last year for which complete data is available. This includes precipitous drops in several categories, such as a 56% drop in burglaries, 37% drop in robberies and a 20% drop in larcenies:
Violent crime remains extremely rare, especially when compared against other categories. But zooming into categories of only violent crime, we notice a pattern: there was a small increase in rapes in 2019, and in 2020, a spike in aggravated assault and a small increase in homicides. All three later declined in 2022.
Bear in mind that these are absolute counts, not adjusted for population. From 2013 through 2022, North Carolina's population increased by 8.6%, adding about 850,000 new residents. This means that on a per capita basis, nearly every category of crime dropped.
The natural question that follows is: where do these crimes occur? After accounting for differences in population, we see that the rates of crime are highly distributed by county, and weigh heavily on more impoverished counties, rather than the most urban. In fact, the counties with the top three crime rates in the state all have fewer than 150,000 residents: Robeson (116,450), Edgecombe (48,246), and Scotland counties (33,603).
We also have data from NC Department of Health and Human Services. Their Violent Death Reporting System triangulates data from multiple sources, including death certificates, medical examiner reports and law enforcement agencies, to get the most accurate reading of deaths and their causes throughout the state. Here, we can see that the regions that suffer from the highest rates of homicides are the southeast (particularly Robeson county) and the northeast:
Zooming out to look at all violent deaths, the rate increases starkly. This has a tragic reason: it includes suicides. Suicide is far more commonly the reason for violent death than homicide, and has become an epidemic in many of North Carolina's rural counties, particularly in the western and southeastern parts of the state.
As we've written about earlier, violent crime in North Carolina's rural counties is a serious, and often ignored, problem. While more discrete acts of crime may occur in more populated areas, rates of crime by population, and thus the likelihood of individuals being personally affected, is dramatically higher in rural areas. North Carolina's metro counties, and its cities in particular, are some of the safest places in the state.
National trends
At the national level, crime has dropped precipitously. The Pew Research Center, looking at CIA data and Bureau of Justice Statistics data (BJS) from 1993 to 2022, showed a steep decline in both violent and property crimes. In violent victimizations per 1,000 people, property crime per 100,000 people, and property victimizations per 1,000 households, the rates have dropped by over half since 1993. Violent crimes per 100,000 people dropped from 747.1 to 380.7.
Of course, the urban legend of cities as hotbeds of violent crime is a stereotype as old as politics itself. The "inner cities" trope - a heavily racialized term - has never been completely accurate, but has been a favorite by politicians who trade on fear and prejudice instead of reason and evidence.
Crime, its causes as well as its reporting, is very complicated. But if we can hazard a generalization based on evidence, we can be confident saying that, on the whole, crime is far less common than it once was. It also has its heaviest burden on North Carolina's rural communities, which have largely been abandoned by leaders in Raleigh for over a decade.
