The rate of violent crimes in Massachusetts held relatively even between 2020 and 2021, even as individual categories of crime rose or fell more sharply, according to data released Thursday by the FBI.
In 2021, the state’s murder rate fell 17% and robberies fell 12.7% from a year prior, even as rapes increased by 10%. Aggravated assaults — which represented more than three-quarters of all violent crime in Massachusetts last year — rose slightly by 0.4%, the FBI data showed.
Overall, violent crime in Massachusetts fell by 0.75% in 2021, in line with a 1% drop nationally. But in releasing last year’s statistics, intended to provide an annual snapshot of national crime trends, the FBI cautioned that the dataset was incomplete.
About 40% of law-enforcement agencies nationwide did not report crime statistics, including major police departments in New York City, Los Angeles and Miami, after a major overhaul in the reporting system, the Associated Press reported. The NYPD said the new system made it unable to submit crime statistics by the deadline, though it did not specify why.
The overhaul will eventually make crime data more modern and detailed, federal officials said, but the switchover can be complicated for police departments. The 2021 FBI report did have data from more than 11,000 departments.
Police in Massachusetts’ largest cities all submitted data to the FBI. The results showed that violent crimes — homicides, robberies, rapes and aggravated assaults — fell from 21,182 in 2020 to 21,023 in 2021.
After 160 homicides in 2020, Massachusetts saw 132 last year. The 17% drop made the state an outlier among other states — national data showed an increase in homicides of 4.3% that the FBI reported.
Robberies in Massachusetts also fell from nearly 3,000 in 2020 to 2,618, a 12.7% drop. Nationally, the FBI data showed a nearly 9% drop in robberies.
Rapes rose in 2021, both in Massachusetts and nationally. After 1,818 rapes in 2020, last year saw a 10% jump to more than 2,000. The FBI’s national data showed a 36% increase in rapes.
The more than 16,000 aggravated assaults in 2021 make up the majority of the year’s violent crimes. After 16,205 aggravated assaults in 2020, there were 16,270 in 2021 — a slight increase of less than half a percent. But nationally, the FBI said the aggravated assault rate rose nearly 28%.
The FBI’s voluntary collection of data from police across the country has long been an important gauge for understanding crime in the United States, but the drop in the number of agencies reporting means the report relied much more heavily on estimation, said Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice. The findings could mean that crime rates are leveling off, but it’s hard to say for sure.
“Some significant care has to be used in extracting conclusions from here,” he said.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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