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Crime stats: Understanding true crime data in New Jersey

On Behalf of | Feb 6, 2017 | Criminal Defense

You watch the news every night, and it feels like people are constantly being arrested and accused of crimes – with many of them pleading their innocence. As a 40-year-old business professional, you know that an arrest could be incredibly detrimental to your career. But you also wonder if the news paints an accurate picture of what things are like in your home state. To get a better idea, here are some key stats from New Jersey.

The violent crime rate: 2.55

The violent crime rate is calculated by looking at how many crimes are committed for every 1,000 residents. This makes it important to note that New Jersey has a population of 8,958,013. With that in mind, the rate is just 2.55 violent crimes for every 1,000 people. For the sake of comparison, the median rate on a national level is 3.8, so the rate in New Jersey is actually lower than it is in many other areas.

Crime totals

It can be helpful to look at the totals, as well. There were 363 murders, 1,373 instances of rape, 9,729 robberies, and 11,414 instances of assault.

For murder, the rate was 0.04 for every 1,000 people. For rape, the rate was 0.15. Both of those are lower than the national rates, which are 0.05 and 0.39, respectively.

The robbery rate in New Jersey was 1.09, which is actually high. On a national level, the rate is 1.02. However, the assault rate (1.27) was also lower than the national rate of 2.38. This shows that robbery is something of an outlier, one of the more common crimes during the year.

As you can see, rates are usually much more telling than raw stats.

Property crime

One thing that you’ll find is that property crimes are far more common than violent crimes, something that’s true all over the country. These can still lead to serious accusations and long-term jail sentences, though. In New Jersey, the property crime rate is 16.26.

Even that is lower than the national rate, which is 24.9.

To break it down further, there were 27,960 burglaries in New Jersey, for a rate of 3.12 per every 1,000 people. The national rate is 4.91 per 1,000 people, though, with a total of 1,579,527 burglaries. Motor vehicle theft in New Jersey was reported with a total stat of 11,778 and a rate of 1.31, which is again lower than the national rate of 2.20.

Your legal defense options

This gives you some idea of the true crime totals in New Jersey. Though the rates may be lower than they are nationally, you can still see that arrests are common. To protect your future, both professionally and personally, you need to know your legal defense options when facing such accusations and charges.