Overall Crime Down In Amarillo For 3rd Straight Year. This An Upward Trend?
We're nearly a month in to the new year, yet stats and numbers are still coming out about 2021.
In this case, the numbers we're getting are good for the most part.
For the third straight year, overall crime in Amarillo trended down. This really is good news as the crime rate in Amarillo has been traditionally high, especially for the size of the city.
OVERALL NUMBERS
Taking a broad stroke look at it, violent crime in Amarillo is down more than 10 percent from 2020. The biggest contributors to this were lower numbers of robberies and aggravated assaults. I'd say those are good things to be down in. One thing I was told when I moved here was to make sure everything was locked up and valuables weren't left in the car. Robberies pertaining to cars was extremely high from everything I'd been told.
PROPERTY CRIMES
So what are considered property crimes? Things such as burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft as well as arson.
According to the City of Amarillo, three of those four categories showed a nice downturn in instances. Burglary incidents dropped from 1419 in 2020 to 1307 in 2021, an improvement of over 100 cases.
Larceny-theft numbers showed a drop of 297 cases, with the overall number dropping from 4887 incidents to 4590. This continues a 3 year downward trend as back in 2018, there were 5803 instances.
There were also less cars stolen in 2021. Back in 2020, we saw 1063 cars get boosted. In 2021, that number dropped all the way down to 859. That's a little over 200 less cars that were taken.
VIOLENT CRIMES
Classification for violent crimes would be things such as rape, robbery, aggravated assault and homicides.
Three of the four categories saw a drop, while one saw an increase here.
Rapes dropped just a touch, from 147 to 145 cases. Not a big drop, but considering 2018 saw a whopping 203 cases, we'll take the 3 year trend of less cases.
Robberies saw a HUGE drop, from 239 in 2020 to 188 cases in 2021. That's a decrease of 51 reported cases of robbery.
Aggravated assaults also saw a big drop from what was a 5 year high of 1279 reported cases in 2020. We saw over 100 less cases of it in 2021 as the final number was 1144.
The one place Amarillo saw an increase was in homicides. Obviously, this is the one we'd prefer would continue to work its way down, but 2021 saw six more homicides than 2020. We had 21 reported homicides in 2021, which represents the most we've seen in the 2000's. However, 85% of the homicides were solved by APD in 2021. By comparison, the national average is 50%.
You can take a look at all the homicides of 2021 here.