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(UPI) -- The Bureau of Justice Statistics announced on Thursday that violent and property crime rates rose for U.S. residents in 2012 according to data collected in the annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS has surveyed victims of crime age 12 or older since 1973.
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Violent crime rose from 22.6 victimizations per 1,000 persons in 2011 to 26.1 in 2012. The majority of the increase was from crimes that went unreported to police and simple assault. The increase in property crime -- 138.7 per 1,000 households in 2011 compared 155.8 in 2012 -- was mostly due to an increase in theft.
According to the survey, the rate of domestic violence, including partner violence and firearm violence, did not change dramatically from 2011 to 2012.
The BJS issued a release about the survey:
The NCVS is the largest data collection on criminal victimization independent of crimes reported by law enforcement agencies to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR)—the nation’s other key measure of the extent and nature of crime in the United States. During 2012, about 92,390 households and 162,940 persons age 12 or older were interviewed for the NCVS. Since the NCVS interviews victims of crime, homicide is not included in these nonfatal victimization estimates.
FBI director James B. Comey said the following about his agency’s UCR program:
"The primary objective of the UCR Program has been to provide reliable crime statistics for use by law enforcement, criminologists, sociologists, legislators, municipal planners, the media, and the general public...In 2012, more than 18,200 such agencies submitted their crime data to the FBI, indicating that violent crime increased for the first time in six years by an estimated 0.7 percent. In the face of this increase, we will continue to work with our partners to prevent violent crime. To that end, the UCR Program plans to collect our nation’s crime data with a new, automated data collection system beginning in 2014.”
