Alaska crime trends show a mixed picture: While property crime rates have steadily declined, violent crime rates remain significantly high, according to national crime data.
The mixed data fits into a decades-long pattern, according to Brad Myrstol, a professor with the Justice Center at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and director of the Alaska Justice Information Center. He gave a presentation on crime rates to the House Judiciary Committee on Feb. 14.
“The good news…the property crime rate has fallen by more than half. So a decline of 64% between 1985 and 2023. And then there’s not so good news,” Myrstol said. “The violent crime rate has held steady since about 1993.”
The crime information is part of the longest-running national crime database, the Uniform Crime Reporting program, managed by the FBI. It includes data from city, university, county, state, tribal and federal law enforcement agencies that is submitted voluntarily each year, and acts as a standardized data set. The purpose is to gauge volume, Myrstol said, and to monitor changes and trends.
In Alaska, property crime rates, which includes larceny theft, burglary and motor vehicle theft, but not arson, consistently declined since 1985. There is some variability over the years, Myrstol said, which is typical, but he called the steady downward trend “good news.”
Myrstol noted larceny theft is the most common type of property crime for the state. It includes theft of possessions like cars, bikes or any item not taken by force, including shoplifting, according to the FBI.
Overall, since 1985, larceny theft rates have declined in Alaska by more than 58%, motor vehicle theft by over 52% and burglary by over 77%.
“It’s a very different picture when it comes to violent crime in Alaska,” Myrstol said, where rates remain significantly and “stubbornly” high since 2000. “Alaska is exceptional. And I don’t mean in a good way.”
Violent crime includes four categories: aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and criminal homicide. Alaska’s violent crime rate has remained steady, or a “flat trend.”
“It is overwhelmingly dominated by volume by aggravated assault,” Myrstol said, which is defined as an attack for the purpose of aggravated bodily injury, and usually with the use of a weapon. Since 1985, aggravated assault rates have increased by over 66%, while robbery has declined somewhat by an estimated 12%, rape by 4% and criminal homicides by 24%.
In 2023, Alaska’s violent crime rate was 5.4 times the national rate, at 1,975.2 per 100,000 residents.
Compared to the national crime rate, reported Alaska aggravated assaults were 6.7 times higher than the national average, at 1,770.4 per 100,000 residents.
Robbery was 1.6 times higher than the national rate, at 77.4 per 100,000 residents. Criminal homicide was 1.3 times higher, at 7.6 per 100,000 residents.
Reported rape was 3.1 times higher than the national rate, at 119.8 per 100,000 residents.
In 2013, the definition of rape expanded to include all sexes and any acts of penetration without consent. Myrstol said that the broader definition resulted in an increase seen in the data. “So it was much more inclusive. Consequently, we fully expected a significant increase in the overall rate from 2012 to 2013 and certainly we do see this on the graph,” he said.
“It’s not just one category of crime that’s higher,” Myrstol emphasized. “It’s all of them, although some are exceptionally, alarmingly high. But it’s violence in general.
“And I’ve told my colleagues here, (for) the unwritten book … the working title could be ‘Alaska: Violent Land.’ I think there’s so much work to be done examining the dimensions of Alaska’s violent crime challenges,” he said.
Myrstol acknowledged many incidents of crime, especially sexual violence, go unreported nationwide as well as in Alaska, and so the data only reflects what incidents are reported to law enforcement.
Myrstol said victimization surveys provide more information and better estimates of the number of people harmed.
The National Crime Victimization Survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice estimates that only about 50% of violent crimes are reported to police nationally. An estimated 46% of sexual assaults are reported to authorities. Property crimes are even lower, with an estimated 30% reported to police.
“What this tells us is, at best, we’re getting less than half of the crime that actually occurs in our communities if we rely on the Uniform Crime Reporting data to estimate prevalence, which is the amount of crime that’s actually happening,” he said. “That’s important.”
Myrstol noted that when a suspect is arrested for multiple crimes, only the most serious is reported to the UCR program, called “the dark figure of crime,” so the data doesn’t capture prevalence.
The most recent Alaska Victimization Survey, conducted in 2020 by the UAA Justice Center, surveyed 13,000 women across the state about their experiences in the past year.
It showed an estimated 18,381 Alaska women, or 6.9%, experienced intimate partner violence; over 8,791 women, or 3.4%, experienced sexual assault; and 21,217 women, or 8.1%, experienced one or both.
“This is the sort of knowledge and information we can glean from victimization surveys,” he said. “We can translate prevalence estimates into the number of Alaskans harmed, and of course, then begin to make much more solid inferences about the impact on communities, as well as to survivors and their families.”
Myrstol said the next Alaska Victimization Survey is currently being organized. The survey will take roughly six months, and results will likely be out in late 2026, he said.
Lawmakers asked whether crime spikes could be tracked and linked to changes in policy or economic downturns, but Myrstol cautioned against any simple explanations.
“Crime, like all human behavior, is multifaceted, and it’s a multivariate, very complex phenomenon,” he said. “So I would just caution the committee about identifying any one particular thing, because it’s usually almost always a combination of things.”
He added that analyzing Alaska’s crime rates would point to strategies to address violent crime.
“I do think the data presented so far, even with limitations of the data inherent within the UCR program, suggests that Alaska’s crime problem is really a violent crime problem,” he said. “If you want to understand crime in Alaska, you might want to look at violent crime first.”