Noel B at the blog The Armchair Scholar has created a nice interactive timeline of how crime has declined nationwide, using numbers compiled by the Disaster Center from the FBI's annual crime report.
The interactive below lets you trace the incidence of various crimes from 1960 to 2012. Use the toggle at the top of the visualization to switch between types of crime.
Noel looked at seven types of crime: burglary, theft, vehicular theft, murder, rape, robbery and assault. All seem to have peaked during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and have been falling quickly since. The drop was expected to stall during the recession, but instead kept going, and in 2012 the crime rate was lower than it's been since 1969.
Here's the breakdown of violent and property crime. There are some slight differences in the size of decline, but overall they've fallen in tandem:
