New Crime Data Has Experts Concerned

comparing violent crime for the first half of 2006 to the first half of 2005, which already saw an increase from the year before:

Overall: +3.7 percent
Homicide: +1.4 percent
Forcible Rape: -less than 1/10th of 1 percent
Robbery: +9.7 percent
Aggravated Assault: +1.2 percent

but property crime, like burglary and auto theft, dropped 2.6 percent.

Source: FBI Semiannual Uniform Crime Report

according to npr:

Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University who has been tracking crime numbers for 30 years...finds the robbery numbers especially troubling, because they've always served as a warning of what's to come.