5.2: Official Statistics

It is surprisingly difficult to know how much crime occurs. Crime is not like the weather, when we all can see whether it is raining, snowing, or sunny. Usually when crime occurs, only the criminal and the victim, and sometimes an occasional witness, know about it. Although we have an incomplete picture of the crime problem, because of various data sources we still have a fairly good understanding of how much crime exists and of who is most likely to do it and be victimized by it.

Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Report

The government’s primary source of crime data is the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), published annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI gathers its data from police departments around the country, which inform the FBI about crimes that have come to their attention. They also report whether an arrest was made and, if so, the arrestee’s age, gender, and race. The FBI gathers all UCR data and reports them in an annual volume called Crime in the United States.

Official Information: The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program generates reliable statistics for use in law enforcement. It also provides information for students of criminal justice, researchers, the media, and the public. The program has been providing crime statistics since 1930 (Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d.).

The UCR Program includes data from more than 18,000 cities, universities and colleges, counties, states, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies. Agencies participate voluntarily and submit their crime data either through a state UCR program or directly to the FBI's UCR Program (Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d.).

The UCR Program consists of four data collections: The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), the Summary Reporting System (SRS), the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) Program, and the Hate Crime Statistics Program. The UCR Program publishes annual reports for each of these data collections and a preliminary semiannual report of summary data each winter, as well as special compilations on cargo theft, human trafficking, and NIBRS topical studies (Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d.). Below provides a list and link of the various reports that can be found on the UCR website:

National Incident-Based Reporting System

The National Incident-Based Reporting System, or NIBRS, implemented to improve the overall quality of crime data collected by law enforcement. It captures details on each single crime incident—as well as on separate offenses within the same incident. In 2021, the historic Summary Reporting System (SRS) data collection, which collected more limited information than the more robust NIBRS, was phased out.

Hate Crime Statistics

The Hate Crime Statistics Data Collection provides information on crimes motivated by offenders’ bias against race, gender, gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. These data are also collected via NIBRS.

Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted

The Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) Data Collection offers information about officers who were feloniously or accidentally killed or assaulted while performing their duties. The information is published and used to help agencies develop polices to improve officer safety.

The National Use-of-Force Data Collection

The law enforcement community, in partnership with the FBI, is working to improve the way the nation collects, analyzes, and uses crime statistics about law enforcement’s use of force. The collection and reporting of use-of-force data will include any use of force that results in the death or serious bodily injury of a person, as well as when a law enforcement officer discharges a firearm at or in the direction of a person.

With the National Use-of-Force Data Collection, data users can view use-of-force incidents involving law enforcement from a nationwide perspective. The goal of the resulting statistics is not to offer insight into single use-of-force incidents but to provide an aggregate view of the incidents reported and the circumstances, subjects, and officers involved.

Crime Data Explorer

The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer (CDE) is the digital front door for UCR data. The interactive online tool enables law enforcement and the public to more easily use and understand the massive amounts of UCR data currently collected. With it, users can view charts and graphs that break down data in a variety of ways. NOTE: UCR data is now being released quarterly on the CDE.

Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection

The Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection aims to help agencies better understand and prevent suicides among current and former law enforcement officers, corrections employees, 911 operators, judges, and prosecutors.

UCR Publications

View historical UCR publications, including Crime in the United States, NIBRS, LEOKA, and Hate Crime Statistics reports, as well as topical reports on cargo theft, human trafficking, federal crime data, and more.

The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program divides offenses into two groups, Part I and Part II crimes (see Crime Definitions in the previous chapter), in its Summary Reporting System. Each month, participating law enforcement agencies submit information on the number of Part I offenses that become known to them; those offenses cleared by arrest or exceptional means; and the age, sex, and race of persons arrested for each of the offenses. Contributors provide only arrest data for Part II offenses.

According to the FBI, in 2008 almost 1.4 million violent crimes and 9.8 million property crimes occurred, for a total of almost 11.2 million serious crimes, or 3,667 for every 100,000 Americans. This is the nation’s official crime rate, and by any standard it represents a substantial volume of criminal activity. However, this figure is in fact much lower than the actual crime rate because, according to surveys of random samples of crime victims, more than half of all crime victims do not report their crimes to the police, leaving the police unaware of the crimes. (Reasons for nonreporting include the belief that police will not be able to find the offender, and the fear of retaliation by the offender.) The true crime problem is therefore much greater than suggested by the UCR.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): When a crime occurs, the police do not usually find out about it unless the victim or a witness informs the police about the crime.
Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

This underreporting of crime represents a major problem for the UCR’s validity. Several other problems exist (Lynch & Addington, 2007). First, the UCR omits crime by corporations and thus diverts attention away from their harm (see a little later in this chapter). Second, police practices affect the UCR. For example, the police do not record every report they hear from a citizen as a crime. Sometimes they have little time to do so, sometimes they do not believe the citizens, and sometimes they deliberately fail to record a crime to create the appearance of effective crime prevention. If they do not record the report, the FBI does not count it as a crime. If the police start recording every report, the official crime rate will rise, even though the actual number of crimes has not changed. In a third problem, if crime victims become more likely to report their crimes to the police, which might have happened after the 911 emergency number became common, the official crime rate will again change, even if the actual number of crimes has not changed.

To get a more accurate picture of crime, the federal government began in the early 1970s to administer a survey, now called the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), to tens of thousands of randomly selected U.S. households. People in the households are asked whether they or their residence has been the victim of several different types of crimes in the past half year. Their responses are then extrapolated to the entire U.S. population to yield fairly accurate estimates of the actual number of crimes occurring in the nation. Still, the NCVS’s estimates are not perfect. Among other problems, some respondents decline to tell NCVS interviewers about victimizations they have suffered, and the NCVS’s sample excludes some segments of the population, such as the homeless, whose victimizations therefore go uncounted.

The table “Number of Crimes: Uniform Crime Reports and National Crime Victimization Survey, 2009” lists the number of violent and property crimes as reported by the UCR (see earlier) and estimated by the NCVS. Note that these two crime sources do not measure exactly the same crimes. For example, the NCVS excludes commercial crimes such as shoplifting, while the UCR includes them. The NCVS includes simple assaults (where someone receives only a minor injury), while the UCR excludes them. Notwithstanding these differences, we can still see that the NCVS estimates about twice as many crimes as the UCR reports to us.

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Source: Data from Pastore, A. L., & Maguire, K. (2010). Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics. Retrieved from http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook.

A third source of crime information is the self-report survey. Here subjects, usually adolescents, are given an anonymous questionnaire and asked to indicate whether and how often they committed various offenses in a specific period, usually the past year. They also answer questions about their family relationships, school performance, and other aspects of their backgrounds. Although these respondents do not always report every offense they committed, self-report studies yield valuable information about delinquency and explanations of crime. Like the NCVS, they underscore how much crime is committed that does not come to the attention of the police.