Heather Yakin: Crime stats encouraging; drug OD news disturbing – News – recordonline.com

The past week and a half has been kind of a good-news, bad-news cycle.

Last week, the Brennan Center for Justice released its revised preliminary analysis of crime and murder in the nation’s most populous cities for 2018. Good news: The Brennan Center’s “early snapshot” report found a 7.6 decrease in the murder rate, based on data from 29 of the 30 largest cities. This takes the murder rate close to that of 2015, which represented the lowest murder rate in the big cities since the historic long-term decline started in 1990.

That decline would be a welcome reversal of the worrisome sharp increases we saw in 2016 and 2017.

Not every city is seeing the benefit: Washington D.C. is on pace for a 34.9 percent increase in the murder rate.

The Brennan Center projects a 2.9 percent decrease for 2018 in overall “Part 1” crime (Brennan collects data on six offenses: murder, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft) for 19 cities that have been able to provide that data. That’s essentially holding steady, according to the Brennan Center, and would also represent the lowest crime rate for these cities since at least 1990.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics, meanwhile, released its report on criminal victimization in 2017. The victimization reports are based on telephone surveys of a representative sample of people aged 12 and up, and they capture data on crimes reported to police as well as unreported crimes.

The victimization survey serves as a complement to FBI statistics, which rely on police agency reporting of crimes and dispositions.

The latest survey found that about 45 percent of violent victimizations and 36 percent of property crimes were reported to police in 2017. One notable increase: The percentage of sexual assaults reported to police rose from 23 percent in 2016 to 40 percent in 2017.

Late last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the agency’s latest number-crunching on drug- and opioid-involved overdose deaths, via an early release for the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The news remains bad: 2017 saw 70,237 drug overdose deaths, a steep jump from 63,632 deaths in 2016. Just over two-thirds of the 2017 deaths, 47,600 of them, involved opioids. The steepest rise in fatal overdose rates came from synthetic opioids: fentanyl and its close chemical analogues. The rate of deaths caused by synthetic opioids rose by 45.2 percent from 2016-2017.

Orange County hit 102 opioid overdose deaths for the year in late November, topping 2017’s full-year total. The county Legislature is pushing the state to outlaw more fentanyl analogues. District Attorney David Hoovler is pushing for more funding for prevention programs and to arrest and prosecute drug dealers, trying to go after both the demand and the supply.

Between 1999 and 2017, the CDC notes, 702,568 people are known to have died from drug overdoses, with 399,230 of those deaths involving opioids. Deaths involving synthetics have risen steeply since 2013, since drug traffickers began spiking heroin with illicitly manufactured or imported fentanyl. The synthetics have become omnipresent, and law enforcement officials have also come across fentanyl or similar synthetics pressed into imitation prescription pills or mixed into cocaine.

At this point, opioid addiction is a slow-motion death sentence.

hyakin@th-record.com

On Twitter @HeatherYakin845