Criminal Victimization, 2018

The longstanding general trend of declining violent crime in the United States, which began in the 1990s, has reversed direction in recent years. The 2018 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is the third consecutive iteration of the NCVS to find that the number of violent-crime victims was higher than in 2015. According to the NCVS, the number of U.S. residents age 12 or older who were victims of violent crime decreased from 2014 to 2015 (the most recent year that a decline was observed). The number of violent-crime victims then increased from 2015 to 2016, before increasing again from 2016 to 2018. There was no statistically significant one-year change in the number of victims from 2016 to 2017 or from 2017 to 2018.