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In 2018, the United States had more than 18,000 police agencies, and about 13,000 of them participated in a voluntary program that reports statistics to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The compiled statistics are published annually in the Uniform Crime Report (UCR). You can access the most recent UCR at the FBI’s website: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018.

The UCR contains information about only certain types of serious crimes, known as Part 1 crimes:

 Murder and non-negligent manslaughter

 Rape

 Robbery

 Aggravated assault

 Burglary

 Larceny-theft

 Motor vehicle theft

 Arson

Because Part 1 crimes are so serious in nature, experts believe that they’re reported more reliably than less-serious crimes. The UCR purposely excludes crimes that people aren’t likely to report, such as drug offenses or embezzlement, as well as crimes that occur infrequently, such as kidnapping.

But even for crimes that you think a victim would report, the actual report rate is quite low. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, only two out of five violent crimes were reported to the police in 2019.

Besides not receiving reports for every crime, another significant problem with the UCR is that a police agency must pick only the most serious crime from a criminal incident to report to the FBI. In other words, the police can’t report multiple crimes that occurred during a single incident. So, if a man steals a car and then later sets the car ablaze to conceal his first crime, the investigating police agency reports only the arson, not the motor vehicle theft.

This will change in 2021 as the FBI completes its transition to a new reporting methodology — the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which is designed to efficiently and accurately gather more information on more crimes from police agencies’ computerized record management systems. The full nature of a multi-crime incident will now be documented.

Despite its problems, the UCR provides a solid, nationwide picture of long-term crime trends and allows for year-to-year comparisons among each of the Part 1 crimes because its problems are generally consistent from year to year.

Figure 3-1 compares the overall violent crime rates over the past three decades (provided by the UCR). The numbers reflect how many violent crimes occurred per 100,000 people in the United States.