WASHINGTON – The estimated number of violent and property crimes declined slightly last year after two years of gains in the violent crime rate, according to FBI figures released on Monday.

In addition to falling numbers,crime rates during the counting of the population have also decreased. The violent crime rate was 392.9 per 100,000 last year, down 0.9% from the previous year, according to the FBI. The property crime rate was 2,362.2 per 100,000 population, down 3.6%, according to the FBI.

The decline occurred during the first year of the administration of President Donald Trump after he appeared at the White House in 2016 for a public order message and pledged to tackle to the problem of violent gangs.

"President Trump has taken office with a mission, a mandate from the American people to restore public safety," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Monday during his speech in Hoover, Alabama.

The sessions credited three of Trump's executive orders with helping to strengthen law enforcement by enhancing the security of agents, striving to dismantle transnational criminal organizations and fighting crime at the national level. He cited public safety partnerships between federal and local authorities in the following areas:

• Compton, California, where the police developed a violence reduction plan that, in three years, led to 1,124 criminal arrests and the seizure of 445 firearms, 80 pounds of explosives, 88 pounds of cocaine, 13 pounds of heroin and 18 pounds of fentanyl.

• Milwaukee, where police identified a hotspot for violent crime and allocated resources to reduce homicides by 17% and non-fatal shootings by 38%.

• Little Rock, Arkansas, where police hired additional crime analysts to trace the links between the crimes. In July, homicides decreased by 22% and violent crime decreased by 25%.

Statistics released Monday are part of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which collected data from 16,655 cities, counties, colleges, states, tribal and federal authorities last year. Agencies reported violent crimes of murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Property crimes include burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft and arson.

Ames Grawert, senior advisor at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said the decline in crime rates was largely due to the decline in property crime. But an analysis of the Brennan Center found that declines in crime rates were particularly pronounced in cities with more than one million inhabitants, where the total number of murders decreased by 8.1%.

"Crime declined across the country last year, consistent with our previous analysis of 2017 data in the 30 largest cities in the country. This is good news, "said Grawert. "The bad news is that, even as crime declines, the number of Americans incarcerated remains at record levels. The time has come to fix the problem.

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