Violent Crime Up, 1st Time In 5 Years

(CBS/AP)  Murders, robberies and aggravated assaults in the United States increased last year, spurring an overall rise in violent crime for the first time since 2001, according to FBI data.

Murders rose 4.8 percent, meaning there were more than 16,900 victims in 2005. That would be the most since 1998 and the largest percentage increase in 15 years.

Murders jumped from 272 to 334 in Houston, a 23 percent spike; from 330 to 377 in Philadelphia, a 14 percent rise; and from 131 to 144 in Las Vegas, a 10 percent increase.

Despite the national numbers, Detroit, Los Angeles and New York were among several large cities that saw the number of murders drop.

The overall increase in violent crime was modest, 2.5 percent, which equates to more than 1.4 million crimes. Nevertheless, that was the largest percentage increase since 1991.

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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. "Funding for prevention at the federal level and many localities are down and the (National Rifle Association) has renewed strength."

John Timoney, Miami's police chief, tells CBS News' The Early Show that the advent over the last three years of the drug meth, as well as a growth in gangs, may be responsible for the spike in crime.

"There's often a trend in violence with that particular drug," Timoney said. "Secondly, we're starting to see the emergence of gangs that have been traditionally in the big cities like L.A. and in the border cities, down in Texas now appear in the Midwest, in Omaha and places like that.

Still, Fox said, "We're still far better off than we were during the double-digit crime inflation we saw in the 1970s."

Robberies were up 4.5 percent and aggravated assaults 1.9 percent, according to preliminary data. Alone among violent crime categories, the number of rapes fell 1.9 percent.

Violent crimes peaked at 1.9 million in 1992 and fell steadily through the end of that decade. The number has been relatively stable for the past six years.

The director of the Justice Policy center in Washington D.C. tells CBS News correspondent Thalia Assuras that the crack and gang driven crisis of the 1980s was reversed during the 1990s for several reasons, including increases in incarceration in the U.S., which caused a lot of people who would have committed violent crimes to be incarcerated.

Criminologist Terry Dunworth tells Assuras a strong economy and improved law enforcement were also likely factors in the decreasing crime rates.

"I think there's a risk that somehow we bottomed out, and things are starting to bounce back up again now," Dunworth tells CBS News.

Crime last year increased in all regions, although the 5.7 percent rise in the Midwest was at least three times any other region's. These states make up the Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin.

Fox cautioned 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.

In Hartford, Conn. for example, murders jumped more than 50 percent, from 16 to 25.