Did the Macon-Bibb crime rate rise or fall in 2019? Here are the statistics from police.
While overall reported crimes have seen a gradual decline in Macon and Bibb County since 2014, some of the more serious crimes such as rape and what sheriff’s officials refer to as “personal” robberies went up last year.
Murders went down to 26, compared with 42 the year before.
The figures were made public in the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office’s Uniform Crime Report for 2019, which heralded an 8% decrease in crime overall compared to 2018.
All told last year, 7,051 people “accused of unlawful acts” were jailed here, the report said.
Aggravated assaults and battery cases, perhaps the most-common among violent crimes, saw a slight drop from 526 in 2018 to 522 in 2019.
Meanwhile, incidents of what the sheriff’s offices describes as “personal” robberies increased from 191 to 239. These would be, for example, people who are the victim of a hold-up on the street.
The report also noted what was described as a “significant” dip in the homicide rate.
In 2018, the county’s homicide toll was 42, a near record. Last year, there were 26 homicides — a number more in line with the number of annual slayings for much of the past decade.
For the seven years included in a span from 2011-17, there were on average 21 homicides annually.
In the property crime category, shoplifting incidents increased to 1,072 last year compared with 885 in 2018.
The report cited a half decade of overall decline in the number of reported crimes: “The total number of crimes in 2014 (was) 10,486. ... Five years later ... there were 2,476 (fewer) crimes committed, with those illegal acts totaling 8,010.”
Other categories noted in the report showed robberies of businesses down from 93 incidents in 2018 to 73 last year; burglaries of businesses down from 382 to 371; home burglaries down from 1,334 to 950, and car break-ins down from 1,626 to 1,402.