Good news on the crime front

As detailed in this UPI story, “violent crime across the United States fell in 2007 for the first time since 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced Monday.”  Here are more details:

An estimated 1.4 million violent crimes were reported last year, a drop of 0.7 percent compared to 2006, the bureau’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division in West Virginia reported. Overall, property crimes fell 1.4 percent in 2007, to an estimated 9.8 million, the FBI said. Larceny and theft offenses accounted for two-thirds of all property crimes, and property crime victims — excluding arson victims — lost an estimated $17.6 billion collectively.

Fellow bloggers at C&C and at Grits are talking about this new crime data.  Scott’s discussion at Grits includes these interesting additional data and insights:

[T]he vast majority of arrests are not for violent or property crimes: “In 2007, the FBI estimated that 14,209,365 arrests occurred nationwide for all offenses (except traffic violations), of which 597,447 were for violent crimes, and 1,610,088 were for property crimes. That means just 15.54% of arrests were for violent crimes or property offenses, a figure which seems surprisingly low to me.   

Some of that can be explained by the drug war: “Law enforcement made more arrests for drug abuse violations (an estimated 1.8 million arrests, or 13.0 percent of the total number of arrests) than for any other offense.” What’s more, 42.1% of drug arrests were for pot possession.