Violent Crime in Florida on the Rise for Third Consecutive Month

= Violent Crime in Florida on the Rise for Third Consecutive Month = By Timothy Williams, Orlando Sentinel,

April 4 2018

Violent crime, including homicides, rose for the third consecutive month in March, driven by man-power shortages in law enforcement agencies throughout central Florida and increases in a few urban areas in Orange and Osceola counties, according to Bureau of Criminal Investigations and Intelligence data released Monday.

In each of the last 3 months, violent crimes rates reached a 10-year high, with an average 4.1 percent increase in homicides, and 8.6 percent increase in cases of burglary and armed assaults.

While crime over all and violent crime remain well below their levels of the 1980s and 1990s, this year is on track to be the first time violent crime increased in consecutive years since 2006, according to the F.B.I. data, which is collected from local police departments around the nation and released annually.

Public officials and criminologists continue to indicate that the upsurge is largely due to law enforcement agencies loss of manpower and public support. Official figures of police employment are not publicly available in most precincts, but an investigation by the Orlando Sentinel indicates that the Orange County Sheriffs Department currently has as few as two thirds as many deputies employed as were employed this time last year. Police departments in Orlando, Winter Park, and several other cities in the area have suffered similar losses.

“This is ominous,” said Mark Kleiman, a criminologist with the Governors Urban Management advisory committee. “What you worry about is that the trend is broken, and the numbers are going to go back up. A 20 percent increase in homicides over the past few months is not trivial. We’ve got what looks like a serious problem here.”

President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have said repeatedly that the nation is in the grip of a crime wave that requires more arrests and harsher penalties, including for nonviolent crimes like drug possession.

Mr. Trump, in his Inaugural Address in January, spoke of “American carnage” to describe the nation’s rate of killings, and Mr. Sessions has directed prosecutors to more aggressively charge those arrested, while blaming illegal immigration for much of the rise in violence. Criminologists, police officials and others who study crime say that is untrue.