Crime is one of the biggest issues around the world. Bringing chaos, pain and suffering throughout the world we decided to study how crime rates have changed throughout the United states. Knowing that crime continues to be a pressing issue, despite efforts from the police, we decided to see if we could find common patterns in how crime changes in the different states throughout the year, connecting them to factors that may affect their rate such as GDP per state, population and unemployment. Crime is an essential factor that should be studied to understand its patterns in an attempt to keep the indices down. A criminal act does not only imply/affect the victim but it often has repercussions in their family as well as in the society as a whole. We want to be able to understand the causes of an increase in crime to determine if there's any type of prevention measurement that would decrease the rates. As a community of more than 331.9 million people, it makes sense to study crime not only in a general view but also throughout the states. Therefore, it is essential to first understand and visualize how crime has behaved through the states. The graph below shows the total crimes per state, throughout the years from 1960 to 2019. The index of total crimes is commposed by the rates of burglary, larceny, motor, assault, rape, robbery. The value of total crimes represents the ratio of total crimes per 100,000 population.
The graph above shows a spike on the rate of crimes per population during the 1990s. From the 1960s an increase in the rate of crimes can be determined, however, this increase of crime spike starts to happen around the 1980s when it first reaches ten thousand crimes per 100,000 population, and then in its maximum point around the 1990s it reaches 12 thousand. In the mid 2000s it seems like the crime rate started to increase rather rapidly, bringing crime down generally below five thousand. The information given by the graph matches with the crack epidemic. Crack epidemic started in the mid 1980s and continued growing until the early 1990s, during this period the rise of crack and cocaine led to a big increase in drug related crimes. The crack epidemic also helped the increase of gang activity during that period, allowing street gangs to further allow an increase in violent acts. With a lot of efforts and government interventions like the program “war on drugs” by president Ronals Reagan, the crime rate was able to decrease in the early 2000s (Crack epidemic). The graph also allows us to visualize the states that have a higher rate of crimes, as seen on the bar graph the District of Columbia mountains itself throughout most of the years as the place with the most amount of crimes. Other outliers with a high level of crime are California, Arkansas, Nevada and Florida (starting from around 1978). On the other hand the states with a lower amount of crime generally throughout the established years are North Dakota, West Virginia and Mississippi. According to Alaska Beacon “the increase [of total crime] is driven by extremely high rates of rape and aggravated assault”. While crime started to drop nationwide, Alaska was a special case as crimes on property started declining but the crimes of violence and assault spiked. The reason for the spike on violent crimes and the decline on Property crimes is yet unknown as it could have been a variety of factors that mixed together to produce that specific result.