March 19, 2024

The 5 Most Common Crimes In America

When you turn on the news, you’d be forgiven for thinking that everybody is a criminal. There are so many scare stories out there that it can make you feel unsafe. The media has painted a picture of an America that’s rife with violent crime, with no safe havens in the entire country. But what is the reality? Is our country really as dangerous the mainstream media would have us believe? The statistics are actually quite scary sounding. A crime is reported every three seconds in the US, but a violent crime is only reported every 22 seconds. Those numbers still seem shockingly high but when you consider that this is for the whole of the country and a lot of these crimes are small misdemeanors, it isn’t as scary. But that still doesn’t give you an answer as to just how dangerous the country is. To try and help you get a bit more perspective, here is a breakdown of the five most common crimes in America.

Theft

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Petty theft is top of the list of crimes in committed at the moment. Not murder, or assault, just small scale theft. That doesn’t mean it’s not a problem, of course, but it’s reassuring to know that violent crimes aren’t the most common. Every year, there are more than seven million instances of theft reported, so if you’re a shoplifting attorney you’ll have your work cut out for you. This type of theft discounts break ins at home and people taking your car so you can see, it’s a huge amount of theft going on every single year which constitutes over half of all reported crimes.

Burglary

Burglary is its own separate category that refers to crimes against a property and makes up a far smaller proportion of all of the crimes that are committed each year. Having said that, it’s still at around twenty percent. Every single year, there are about two million break ins reported.

Motor Vehicle Theft

Third place is still a kind of stealing that doesn’t involve a violent aspect. The theft of any kind of motor vehicle is reported about a million times a year. That’s ten percent of all reported crimes for the year. So, if we look at what we have so far, around seventy percent of the crimes that are reported every year are non-violent forms of theft.

Aggravated Assault

It isn’t until we get to the fourth place spot that we first see a violent crime. Aggravated assault is defined as being any assault with intent to seriously injure somebody. The majority of violence against strangers is involved in some kind robbery and aggravated assaults tend to be carried out against people that are known to the attacker. Random attacks are very rare. Every year, roughly seven percent of all crimes reported are aggravated assaults.

Robbery

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At number five, we’re back to stealing. Robbery specifically refers to a theft carried out on a person, usually violently. Somebody holding up a store is robbery, and so is a mugging. Only three percent of all of the yearly crimes are robberies so the risk of it is actually far lower than you’d think.

While the world is still a dangerous place, you are not at risk of violent crimes nearly as often as you might think.

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