This Is the City Where Assaults Are Rising the Most

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 25, 7:30AM EDT

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This Is the City Where Assaults Are Rising the Most — © carlballou / Getty Images

The Federal Bureau of Investigation describes aggravated assault as an “unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury.” The FBI Uniform Crime Report shows that there were 810,825 aggravated assaults in 2019. That is up 1.0% from the year before but down 3.9% from 2008. These incidents happened at a rate of 249 per 100,000 people during the year.

Among the ways the Uniform Crime Reports sorts crimes is by state and by city.

Even as violent crime continues to decrease in the United States, there are still metropolitan areas in which the rates of aggravated assault have skyrocketed over the past five years. One reason given is that the majority of these incidents are domestic violence, which appears to be on the rise. An example of this is a statement by Capt. Jeff Wilson of the St. Joseph Police Department: “What we’re seeing is primarily an increase in domestic assaults. Actually, the domestic assaults encompass the majority of our assaults.”

His comments were not isolated.
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The city where aggravated assaults have risen the most is Kokomo, Indiana. Here are the details:

Five-year change in assault: 221.2%
Assaults in 2014: 138.9 per 100,000 (115)
Assaults in 2019: 446.2 per 100,000 (368)
Five-year change in violent crime: 144.6%

24/7 Wall St. recently reported on the soaring rate of homicides, also based on FBI data. Among the findings:

Homicides are rising at a record pace in the United States. According to a recent FBI report, there were a total of 21,570 murders committed in 2020, the most of any year in the last two and a half decades and up nearly 30% from 2019 — the largest annual increase on record.

Click here to see all 25 cities where aggravated assault is on the rise.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.