By DAVID HO

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Reports of rape and aggravated assault increased in the first half of this year as the nation’s longest-running decline in overall crime came to a virtual halt, the FBI said Monday.

"The 1990s crime drop has ended with the 1990s," said professor James Alan Fox of Northeastern University in Boston.

The bureau’s preliminary figures indicate serious crimes — murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, auto theft and arson — were down 0.3 percent in the first six months of this year compared with the same period of 1999, which saw a drop of 9.5 percent over the year before.

The number of crimes reported to police has fallen every year since 1992, a trend that has lasted almost three times longer than the second-longest decline, the three years from 1982 through 1984. But this year’s decrease is the smallest.

"This is the criminal-justice limbo stick; we just can’t go any lower," Fox said. "We’ve had eight straight, wonderful years of declining crime rates, and at a certain point you just can’t push those numbers further down, and we’ve hit that point."

While both violent and property-related crimes declined overall by 0.3 percent, the picture was mixed for specific offenses.

The FBI report indicated murder declined 1.8 percent and robbery fell 2.6 percent, but both rape and aggravated assault went up 0.7 percent in the first half of 2000. For the same period in 1999, rapes fell 8.4 percent and assaults went down 7.1 percent.

Regionally, the West had the largest increase in rapes with a 3.4 percent rise, followed by the Northeast (up 2.1 percent) and the Midwest (up 0.6 percent). Reports of rape in the South declined 1.9 percent.

Among property crimes, burglary fell 2.4 percent, but auto theft rose 1.2 percent and larceny-theft increased 0.1 percent. Arson, which is included in the overall serious crime figures but not the property crime totals, was down 2.7 percent.

Crime was down in cities with populations over 250,000, but rose or leveled off in smaller cities. Crime also rose in the suburbs and was up 3 percent in rural communities, which also saw a 7.1 percent increase in murders.

"We can’t bring crime levels down to zero. Criminal activity is unfortunately something that’s part of human behavior," he said. "Regardless of what we do, we will still have rape, murder, robbery."

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