Here’s some good news about crime: There’s less of it.
That runs counter to what one might read or hear in certain places, but the numbers don’t lie.
In its 2024 NEPA Regional Indicators Report, The Institute, a nonprofit partnership of 13 local colleges and universities and the business community, presents evidence that property crimes and violent crimes in 2023 in our region were at their lowest level in more than a decade. The findings, based on data collected by the Pennsylvania Uniform Crime Reporting System, cover three counties — Lackawanna, Luzerne and Wayne.
Our own independent review of the system’s data for Schuylkill County tells essentially the same story. Violent crimes, including homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, totaled 174 in 2023, lower than any other year going back to 2012. Those types of crimes peaked in Schuylkill County in 2018 at 324. Property crimes, including burglary, theft and arson, were at their second-lowest level in 12 years at 1,061, bested only by 2021, when they stood at 1,008.
That steady drop in crime follows state and national trends. Violent crimes in Pennsylvania as a whole were at a 12-year low in 2023. While property crimes were up 5.5% over 2022 at 206,127, they remained well below their peak in 2012-2016, when they averaged 254,436 annually.
Nationally, the violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2022, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of FBI data that also showed property crime down 59% in the same period.
Of course, state and national trends don’t always apply to local circumstances. Homicide rates are up in Seattle, Memphis and Washington, D.C., for example.
Closer to home, Scranton has had five homicides so far this year, a shocking number when one considers all of Lackawanna County only had five in each of the past two years and the city had a total of five in 2021-23.
But as homicides are relatively rare and more often than not involve perpetrators who are known to their victims, such spikes are usually less informative about wider public safety than other statistics. And those statistics indicate recent partisan rhetoric about out-of-control crime is overblown.
As we enter a heated General Election season, crime is going to be on the political agenda, likely coupled with words like “rampant” and “runaway.”
But the numbers tell a different story, that our neighborhoods are safer than they have been in more than a decade, and that should make all of us sleep more soundly at night.
— The Citizens’ Voice, Wilkes-Barre via TNS
