The FBI released a preliminary report today on the crime trends from last year in the country. You can find specifics here.

Here's the report from the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI says violent crime dropped in 2008 in the United States, falling 2.5 percent compared to the previous year.

Property crimes also fell, by 1.6 percent, according to the preliminary data collected by the FBI. Nationwide, murder and manslaughter dropped 4.4 percent.

There were some increases, though. In small cities with less than 10,000 residents, murder rose 5.5 percent, rape increased 1.4 percent, and robbery 3.9 percent. Across the country, car thefts dropped more than 13 percent.

The western region of the country saw the biggest declines, with a 4.2 percent drop in property crime and a 3.4 percent drop in violent crime. The Northeast saw a slight increase in property crime, which went up by 1.6 percent.

As previously reported in The News Tribune, crime in dropped in the state in 2008 but increased slightly in Tacoma and Pierce County. Here's my story from mid-May.

Crime dropped throughout the state last year, but increased slightly in Tacoma and unincorporated Pierce County, according to preliminary statistics released this week by the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs.

Statewide, violent crime fell 1 percent and property crime dropped 6.2 percent between 2007 and 2008.

The violent crimes that are counted are murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assaults. The property crimes are burglary, larceny, theft, motor vehicle theft and arson.

In Tacoma, overall crime rose 2.1 percent despite a drop in violent crime. The Pierce County Sheriff's Department saw a 0.2 percent increase in overall crime despite handling fewer property crimes.

Statewide, law enforcement agencies reported more homicides and robberies. There were fewer robberies, thefts and arsons.

The most prominent change came in car thefts, which dropped nearly 25 percent, according to the report. Law enforcement agencies handled 27,730 motor vehicle thefts in 2008, down from 36,932 in 2007.

The report included these other statistics:

• $329,005,833: the value of the property stolen in 2008, down 7.1 percent from 2007 when it was $354,106,974.

• $104,666,693: the value of the property recovery in 2008, down 24.7 percent from 2007 when the value was $138,922,219.

• 886: the number of law enforcement officers assaulted last year, down 4.1 percent from the 924 in 2007.

• 235: the number of incidents involving criminal offenses of hate or bias crimes that were reported last year. This was an increase of 26.7 percent over 2007.

• 42,500 domestic-violence crimes were reported in 2008. That was a decrease of 11.7 percent from 2007.

An agency-by-agency breakdown of reported crime statistics is available at www.waspc.org.</blockquote>

The February reports for the Tacoma Police Department's sectors and specialty units are now posted on the department's web site.

Here's a recap from each report:

Sector 1: Officers arrested two juveniles on suspicion of robbing and beating up a transient Feb. 4. Officers found the victim in the 1700 block of South Fawcett Avenue. He reported the attackers beat him up and stole his backpack and cell phone. The two boys were booked into Remann Hall juvenile detention in connection with the robbery.

An apartment manager shot a suspected car prowler in the arm Feb. 6 during a confrontation in the 600 block of South Yakima Avenue. Two suspects had been prowling a vehicle in the apartment complex parking lot when the manager armed himself and confronted them. One of the suspects fled. The other attacked the manager, who shot the suspect in the arm. The suspect was taken to the hospital for non-life threatening injuries.

The community liaison officers found five transient camps in February. They evicted the occupants and had work crews clean up the sites.

Sector 2: Officers recovered two stolen guns during a domestic-related incident. They found one gun in the truck of the dv suspect. The victim of the assault handed over a second stolen gun the suspect had given her to keep in her vehicle. "The handgun was a WSP Beretta which had been stolen in 2000," the department reported.

Sector 3: A juvenile was injured by gunfire while riding in the back of his father's car in the area of South 56th and Tyler streets. Officers reported the two appeared to be innocent victims.

Officers arrested 10 juveniles on suspicion of attacking and robbing another juvenile who was walking to school.

Officers found five transient camps in the Wapato Hills area. The transients were evicted and the camps cleaned up.

Sector 4: The CLOs held a Tow Day in late February. They placed warnings on 55 vehicles, warning the owners the vehicles needed to be moved in a week or be towed at the owner's expense. The following week, officers found that most of the vehicles had been moved. Only nine remained. Those were impounded.

Gang unit: Officers in the unit made 43 arrests in February and booked those people into jail on 94 charges. Of those, 29 were gang related, four were gun related and 21 were drug related. Nine of the people arrested were on active DOC supervision. Officers seized one vehicle and $4,280 in cash.

K-9 unit: The police dogs conducted 25 tracks and made one evidence find. They made four felony arrests and assisted with 25 other arrests.

Traffic unit: Officers issued 1,680 violations from the city's nine red light cameras. The traffic officers wrote 762 citations citywide and made 19 drunken driving arrests. For February, drivers in Sector 1 received the most citations with 262 of the 762 tickets written.

Marine Services Unit: Members of this unit completed five vessel safety inspections, conducted 66 visual safety inspections, handled three complaints of water activity and assisted in one boater rescue.

Tacoma ranks the highest in crime of any city in the Pacific Northwest, according to new statistics from CQ Press.

Tacoma ranks No. 39 for cities with the highest crime rating, with the city's score at 143.92. If you want to look at it the opposite way, Tacoma is the No. 347 safest city in the nation.

The closest Northwest city is Everett, which comes in at No. 55.

Tacoma fell from No. 33 last year.

The most crime-ridden city in the nation is New Orleans, La., with a crime score of 441.40. The rating score is made by looking at murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft statistics.

Other Northwest cities, ranked by highest crime rate, include Yakima at No. 84, Spokane at No. 123, Portland at No. 141 and No. 165 Seattle.

More information is available at CQ Press.

The FBI this morning released the preliminary crime statistics for 2007.

The good news is there were declines reported in violent and property crimes. That mirrors what Tacoma and Pierce County experienced last year (and what we reported in March.)

Here are some highlights from the agency's press release:

* All four of the violent crime offense categories declined nationwide in 2007 compared with data from 2006. Forcible rape decreased 4.3 percent, and murder and non-negligent manslaughter declined 2.7 percent. Robbery and aggravated assault offenses each decreased 1.2 percent.

* Forcible rape declined in all population groupings. Cities with one million or more inhabitants experienced the greatest decline, at 8.0 percent.

* Property crime decreased in all city groupings. Cities with 250,000 to 499,999 inhabitants had the greatest decrease in property crimes with a decline of 4.2 percent. Non-metropolitan counties saw a 1.7 percent decrease in property crime, and metropolitan counties had a 1.6 percent decline.

* Burglary offenses ranged from a decrease of 3.3 percent in cities with 500,000 to 999,999 persons to an increase of 4.0 percent in cities with one million or more inhabitants.

* Motor vehicle theft experienced declines in all population groupings.

* Arson offenses, tracked separately from other property crimes, decreased 7.0 percent nationwide and declined in each of the population groupings.

See below for my March story on Tacoma and Pierce County's crime stats for 2007.

=> Read more!

It wasn't Tacoma, though the county's largest city did come in third.

Puyallup led the list with 86.7 crimes per 1,000 residents. Fife was second with 86.5.

Tacoma's crime rate was 83.4. (The crimes counted to calculate the crime rate are murders, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, thefts, motor vehicle thefts and arsons.)

The information comes from the preliminary 2007 crime statistics posted on the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs web site.

Other notes from the preliminary crime stats:

* 21 law enforcement agencies were listed in Pierce County.

* Two agencies - Puyallup Tribal police and Wilkeson - did not report their crime stats. An error was reported in the information from Orting P.D.

* 15 agencies saw decreases in their overall crime. Those were the Pierce County Sheriff's Office and Bonney Lake, DuPont, Eatonville, Edgewood, Fife, Fircrest, Gig Harbor, Lakewood, Milton, Ruston, Steilacoom, Sumner, Tacoma and University Place police departments.

* Buckley, Puyallup and Roy reported increases in their total crime.

* DuPont had the largest drop in crime and Roy had the largest increase.

* In the county as a whole, crime dropped 8.6 percent.

And how does the Pierce County Sheriff's Office stack up with its counterparts across the state? Pierce County deputies are not dealing with the highest crime rate in the state.

The Columbia County Sheriff's Office reported the highest total crime rate in 2007 with 43.9 crimes per 1,000 residents.

Next comes Grant County Sheriff's Office (42.9), Mason County Sheriff's Office (41.4), Kittitas County Sheriff's Office (36.8), Skagit County Sheriff's Office (34.2), Adams County Sheriff's Office (33.6), Pend Oreille Sheriff's Office (33.3), Yakima County Sheriff's Office (32.5) and then Pierce County Sheriff's Office (30.6).

The King County Sheriff's Office's rate was 23.7 and Thurston County's was 21.4.

The Ferry County Sheriff's Office reported the lowest crime rate with 4.6 crimes per 1,000 residents.

The FBI released its first look at crime that occurred in 2007.

This preliminary report covered only the first six months of 2007 but revealed that:

Each of the violent crime offense categories (murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) decreased nationwide during January through June 2007 when compared to the corresponding months in 2006. Murder decreased 1.1 percent, forcible rape declined 6.1 percent, robbery decreased 1.2 percent, and aggravated assault decreased 1.7 percent.

Violent crime increased 1.1 percent in non-metropolitan counties and 1.1 percent in cities with populations of 10,000 to 24,999. In addition, small increases were experienced in cities under 10,000 in population (0.3 percent) and in cities with populations of 100,000 to 249,999 (0.1 percent).

Overall, violent crime decreased in all four of the nation's regions during the reporting period.

Each of the property crime offense categories (burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft) decreased in the first six months of 2007 when compared to data for the same six month period in 2006. Burglary decreased 1.3 percent, larceny-theft declined 2.1 percent, and motor vehicle theft decreased 7.4 percent.

The report also detailed crime information from cities with a population over 100,000 people, which includes Tacoma.

In our city, violent crime was up in the first six months of 2007, while property crime was down.

In Seattle, both property and violent crime were down.

The City of Tacoma has launched a new web site/web service that allows you to get crime, code and other information for a specific address.

You'll also get resources such as City Council members and city departments. The site provides links to neighborhood crime data, neighborhood code violations and parcel information.

I've been playing around with it a little this morning and it's pretty handy. You can even get information - although much more limited - about addresses out in the county.

Check out the site.

The King County Sheriff's Office recently added a searchable crime statistics tool to its Web site.

The tool allows folks to search for crime stats for their neighborhoods. I gave it a quick try, and it seems pretty user friendly.

The information is updated the first week of each month.

Go crazy.

The New York Times has a story in today's paper about a recent study that found violent crime is on the rise again across the country.

The story begins:

Violent crime rose by double-digit percentages in cities across the country over the last two years, reversing the declines of the mid-to-late 1990s, according to a new report by a prominent national law enforcement association.

While overall crime has been declining nationwide, police officials have been warning of a rise in murder, robbery and gun assaults since late 2005, particularly in midsize cities and the Midwest. Now, they say, two years of data indicates that the spike is more than an aberration.

To read the full report, go to the Police Executive Research Forum's web site.

The City of Tacoma was not included in the study. However, we can tell you that there’s been a 2.72 percent increase in violent crimes over the past two years.

According to the Tacoma Police Department, there were 2,021 violent crimes reported in 2004 and 2,076 in 2006. The violent crimes are homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

Over the past 10 years, violent crime has dropped 30 percent in the city, dropping from 2,982 crimes in 1997 to 2,076 last year.

More Tacoma crime stats are online.

I've got a story in today's paper that reveals the 2006 violent crime stats for the Tacoma Police and Pierce County Sheriff's departments.

If you want to spend more time looking at and analyzing crime stats, there are plenty of places to look.

The Tacoma Police Department provides citywide and sector-based stats and calls for service reports on its web site.

The Pierce County Sheriff's Department hosts the a crime data page that allows people to search for crimes within a .5-mile radius of a given address in Bonney Lake, Tacoma, Puyallup, South Prairie, Edgewood and University Place.

WACrimeStats.net allows you to customize how you want to look at crime reports most law enforcement agencies in the state. You can look at just one agency or compare several over time. It's a handy site. Here are two charts I created recently.

Picture 1.pdf

Picture 2.pdf

Uniform Crime Report data for agencies in Washington also is searchable on the state Office of Financial Management's Web site.

If you want to compare your city to another city in the country, check out this site.

The Washington Association of Sheriffs & Police Chiefs is out with its annual mid-year crime report.

There's some good news for Tacoma (and it's a little surprising, at least to me, given the reports of gang violence this year.) Violent and property crimes are down in the city. It's the same story for Federal Way and King and Thurston counties.

Pierce County has mixed results. Violent crime is up slightly and property crime is down. That's the trend for the entire state.

I just posted a story on our homepage with more complete numbers. A more complete look at the mid-year crime stats for all reporting agencies can be downloaded off WASPC's homepage.

It will be interesting to see if this trend continues through the end of the year or whether something changes to flip the numbers.

An Olympia company has dipped into the world of Internet-based crime stats.

Looking Glass Analytics announced today they've launched a new web site, www.WACrimestats.net. Users can browse - for free - crime statistics from Washington law enforcement agencies.

The information is based upon the stats provided to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs through the Uniform Crime Report. That's the standard reporting technique and the report that feeds the annual FBI report.

Each user can tailor the site to provide stats by crime, jurisdiction, etc. Crimes are broken down by reported crimes and per capita rates. Crime statistics are available from 1994 to 2005.

There is also information specifically for gun-related crime.

Check it out. It's a pretty cool site.

I tooled around on it for a little bit this morning. I like the ability to tailor-make your comparisons, look at trends over a period of time and look at different crimes.æ