Despite the “Chicken Little” rhetoric coming out of the Justice Department this past year and the concerned talk around dinner tables, America is not and has not been on the edge of a crime-wave abyss.

It’s true that the FBI crime report released early last week shows that, tragically, a few areas saw an uptick in some violent crime in 2017. For example, violent crime in the city of Baltimore rose roughly 13 percent from 2016. Yet the 2017 national violent crime rate decreased by .09 percent from 2016. And looking over the last two decades, the national violent crime rate in 2017 is still near an all-time low, ranking 17 out of 20. Indeed, the 2017 violent crime rate is more than 16 percent lower than in 2008 and 32 percent lower than in 1998. Meanwhile, property crimes (which make up the vast majority of overall crimes) dropped for the 15th year in a row.