Burglary rates and trends in Abilene and Atlanta

¶ … crime rate data of burglaries in two U.S. metropolitan localities.

The UCR (Uniform Crime Reporting) Program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation describes the act of burglary as illegal entry into a structure for committing theft or a felony. For labeling a crime as burglary, it is not necessary for the element of 'forced entry'. UCR provides three sub-categories of burglary: forced entry; non-forced, illegal entry; and attempted forced entry. It defines the term "structure" as any apartment, houseboat or house trailer (utilized as permanent lodgings), office, barn, stable, vessel or ship, and railroad car (however, automobiles are not included). In the year 2012, approximately 2,103,787 burglaries were reported -- a 3.7% decline from the previous year (FBI -- Burglary). Compared to the figures for 2003 and 2008, burglaries declined in 2012 by 2.4% and 5.6%, respectively. The approximate burglary rate constituted 23.4% of the approximate property crime rate. Subcategory-wise, 59.7% of burglaries were forced entries, 33.9% were illegal entries, and the remaining 6.3% came under the category of attempted forced entries. In 2012, burglary victims bore property losses worth roughly 4.7 billion dollars. On the whole, losses of 2,230 dollars were, averagely, experienced for every burglary. Residential property burglaries made up about three-quarters of all burglaries.

Area with More Reported Incidents/Rates

In Texas's Abilene City (Jones, Taylor, and Callahan Counties), the year 2012 alone witnessed a total of 1,037 individual burglary incidents, with the burglary rate being 737.1 residents for every 100,000 people (FBI -- Burglary). Georgia's Atlanta city witnessed 2, 062 burglary reports in 2012, with the burglary rate being 1,311.4 residents for every 100,000 people.

Factors to Explain Rate Differences

Business districts and other locales housing many businesses normally witness more crime. Such crimes are typically "business" crimes, and include commercial burglaries, shoplifting, forgery, and larceny. Additionally, more offenses against individuals are also perpetrated in such localities (e.g., muggings, automobile thefts, and stealing of personal items from automobiles, etc.) (Diggs). Bruce Weinburg's 2002 research performed at the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, and printed in "The Review of Economics and Statistics," revealed that a weak economy greatly affects crime rates. The researcher and his coworkers examined U.S. crimes rates from 1979 to 1997 and discovered that the crime growth in that era was most probably because of a growth in unemployment and a drop in wages in males who had poor education. The researcher believes offending increases when wages drop, owing to greater payoff for crime. Graffiti-covered, disorderly and shabby localities typically witness more criminal activity compared to orderly localities. In the year 1982, Harvard University's James Q. Wilson and Rutgers University's George L. Kelling, put forward their "broken windows" idea for accounting for this phenomena (Diggs). This theory claims that, if a single broken window in a structure remains unrepaired, every other window will ultimately become broken. The very first neglected window indicates to us that nobody is concerned about that window, or any other window in the structure, for that matter. Hence, the good windows are targeted by petty criminals, and their activities spread in different ways all over the apathetic locality. Ever since this theory's appearance, a number of research works (including one performed in 2008 by University of Groningen's researchers S. Lindenberg and K. Keizer) have corroborated it.