City Crime Rate Rises, Bucking State Trends

Governor Malloy recently celebrated a significant reduction in the rate of crime in Connecticut, including a 9.7 percent decrease in violent crimes from 2013 to 2014. The reduction reflected lower crime rates in almost all cities and towns in the state.

Middletown is an outlier. Our city's crime rate was higher in 2014 than it was in 2013, in some categories significantly so.

The statistics come from the Uniform Crime Reporting data released by the FBI last Monday. Those data show the relative decrease or increase in the rate of crime in each of 92 municipalities, subdivided by the type of crime.

In the category of Aggravated Assault, while statewide levels decreased by 8.3%, Middletown showed an increase of 5.24%.  Of the 92 cities and towns in the data set, only Waterford, Old Saybrook, and Norwich had worse percentage increases in these crimes.

Statewide, Violent Crime decreased by 9.7%, but in Middletown it increased by 3.8%; this was the 10th worst rate of change among the 92 municipalities.

The Property Crime rate increased by 6.85% in Middletown, 32nd worst among the 92.  Statewide, Property Crime decreased by 3%.

The absolute rate of crime in Middletown remains lower than the state averages. In 2014 there were 17.6 incidents of Violent Crime per 10,000 residents in Middletown, compared to a statewide rate of 23.7 incidents per 10,000 residents. For Aggravated Assault, the city rate was 11.2 per 10,000 while the state rate was 13.6 per 10,000.

But these numbers are moving in the wrong direction, opposite the improvements taking place statewide.

Statewide data and analysis is HERE, further information on other municipalities is HERE.