Law Blog 4 Fighting Abuse

Crimes in Texas are increasing every day. Violent crime is occuring at every 4 minutes. In totality, crime of any type occurring every 29 seconds. This is really high and needs a consideration. In the year 2008 the Texas Department of Public Safety estimates there were a total of 1,098,428 crime offenses across the entire state, down 1.2 percent from 2007. Of this number, 11 percent were violent crimes with 89 percent being property crimes. These numbers do not include arson statistics, in which there were 6,363 cases reported for the same year, an increase of 6.0 percent from 2007.

Violent Crimes
Violent crimes are generally defined as crimes that involve a confrontation between two individuals – a perpetrator and a victim. In Texas in 2008, there were 123,621 reported violent crimes. This was a slight increase of 1.2 percent in number from the previous year’s reported data. Broken down by type, the violent crimes were 62 percent aggravated assault, 31 percent robbery, 6 percent rape, and 1 percent murder.

Property Crimes
There were an estimated 969,807 reported property crimes in Texas in 2008, down 1.5 percent from 2007. This total is 67 percent theft, 24 percent burglary and 9 percent motor vehicle theft. In terms of worth these numbers represent $2,027,030,439 worth of stolen property value.

Frequency
The Texas Department of Public Safety broke all of the data down based on a clock, to show how frequently the crimes occur on average in Texas. For property crimes, there is one larceny-theft every 48 seconds, one burglary every 2 minutes, and one motor vehicle theft every 6 minutes. This makes one property crime occurring every 33 seconds. For violent crimes, there is one aggravated assaults every 7 minutes, one robbery every 14 minutes, one rape every 1 hour, and one murder every 6 hours and 23 minutes. This means one violent crime occurs every 4 minutes. In total, these numbers show a crime of some type occurring every 29 seconds. These numbers should only be seen as an aggregate representation of data, and do not mean that these crimes actually occur with this consistency or frequency.

This article is not legal advice and there are no claims made for the completeness, relevance, adequacy or accuracy of the information presented. All data and statistics listed in this article are from the 2008 Crime in Texas Report published by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

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