Violent crime in Seattle and nation rose last year

Violent crime in Seattle rose last year, mirroring the first nationwide increase in the number of murders, forcible rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults in 15 years, but several smaller Washington cities bucked the trend.

According to data collected by the FBI from law-enforcement agencies across the country, the nation experienced the first overall increase in the number of reported violent crimes since 1991. The overall national increase was a modest 2.5 percent, which equates to more than 1.4 million additional crimes.

In Seattle, there were 4,109 incidents of violent crime in 2005 compared with 3,798 in 2004, with an increase of nearly 300 aggravated-assault incidents over the previous year's number of just over 2,000. That's the largest percentage increase in aggravated assaults reported since 1998.

The increase nationwide may be skewed in part by certain cities, such as Houston, which saw its murder rate jump 272 in 2004 to 334 last year, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report. There were 25 slayings reported in Seattle in 2005, and 24 in 2004, according to the FBI report.

The Seattle Police Department said the total number of murders in 2004 and 2005 was the lowest number of murders in a two-year period since 1964 and 1965.

The police department also addressed the increase in aggravated assaults, which often involve the use of a weapon, and said the department is focusing much of its efforts on reducing this crime.

Statewide, the violent-crime rate increased 2.7 percent while the property-crime rate was up 2.3 percent, according to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs.

However, Bellevue, Spokane, Tacoma and Vancouver — the other Washington state cities included in the FBI report — all reported fewer violent crimes in 2005 than in the previous year.

The overall percentage decrease in violent crimes was slightly higher than 1 percent in Bellevue, according to Bellevue Police Department spokesman Greg Grannis, with 172 incidents of violent crime in 2005 compared with 174 the year before. Two murders were reported in Bellevue last year compared with none in 2004.

Grannis said Bellevue did register a slight increase in arson reportings mostly due to a youth who set a number of trash-bin fires.

Property crimes such as burglary and vehicle theft were down nationwide and in Washington state, with the exception of Tacoma, which reported 16,802 property crimes in 2005 compared with 16,580 in 2004.

The FBI data, compiled from reports by more than 12,000 law-enforcement agencies, does not contain overall crime numbers in any category, nor does it offer any explanation for the changes.

The FBI's final annual crime report comes out in the fall.

Criminal-justice experts said the statistics reflect the nation's complacency in fighting crime, a product of dramatic declines in the 1990s and the abandonment of effective programs that emphasized prevention, putting more police officers on the street and controlling the spread of guns.

"We see that budgets for policing are being slashed and the federal government has gotten out of that business," said James Alan Fox, a criminal-justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston.

Fox cautioned, however, against reading too much into year-to-year changes in individual cities, saying some differences result from random variation and marked swings the previous year.

Also, some large statistical increases result from some small numerical changes.

Christine Clarridge: 206-464-8983 or cclarridge@seattletimes.com

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.