Report: Property crime down; violence on the rise

By Steve Kanigher

Wednesday, May 25, 2011 | 9:16 p.m.

The Las Vegas metropolitan area doesn’t have as much property crime as it did two decades ago, but it is somewhat more violent.

That’s the overall impression from data released Wednesday by the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington in its report “City and Suburban Crime Trends in Metropolitan America.”

The report concluded, based on data from the FBI and Census Bureau, that violent crimes and property crimes declined significantly in America’s 100 largest metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2008, with the sharpest drops in densely populated cities and older suburbs.

Co-author Steven Raphael, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said crime rates between cities and suburbs are also narrowing.

“One of the reasons crime rates have fallen considerably is that the population has aged,” Raphael said of the national trends. “Education achievement has also increased.”

Contrasting national trends, data for the Las Vegas area presented a mixed picture, with property crime rates declining but violent crime on the rise.

“It contradicts what’s happening nationally because property crime rates and violent crime rates usually move together,” Raphael said.

Property crime in Southern Nevada dropped from 5,712 incidents per 100,000 residents in 1990 to 3,611 per capita in 2008, the last year FBI data were available when the researchers began their study. Although the property crime rate in Las Vegas, Henderson, North Las Vegas and Boulder City rose slightly from 3,903 per capita in 2000 to 3,972 per capita in 2008, the rate in the unincorporated suburbs fell from 3,557 to 2,665 over the same period. Still, the property crime rates in the cities remain well below 1990 levels.

In Southern Nevada, violent crimes rose from 636 per capita in 1990 to 835 per capita in 2008. Curiously, the per capita rate rose sharply in the cities from 600 in 2000 to 992 in 2008 but fell in the suburbs from 543 to 423 over the same period.

Officer Bill Cassell, a Metro Police spokesman, said he couldn’t immediately comment on the report because he hadn’t seen it. Cassell also said it would take Metro several days to analyze the data to determine whether they are accurate.

Raphael said he couldn’t interpret the Las Vegas numbers because he isn’t familiar with Southern Nevada’s demographics. But he said areas with increased violent crime rates tend to be those with younger populations and higher poverty rates.