Crime Reports and Statistics

Police Reports of Crime

A significant amount of information on crime is collected and reported by law enforcement agencies. Federal, state, and local police agencies provide us with data on the numbers and types of crimes that are reported, the number of offenders who have been arrested, and the number of crimes that are not solved. The most comprehensive collection of police crime reports is the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports, the first collection of statistics of its kind in the United States.

Congress created the U.S. Department of Justice in 1870 and assigned the attorney general the task of providing annual reports to Congress on the amount of crime in the country. However, this task was not carried out until 1930, when the FBI was asked to serve as a clearinghouse for all police reports. During the first year, nearly 400 police departments across forty-three states sent reports to the FBI. Even though police departments are not required to cooperate with the FBI, over 17,000 city, county, and state law enforcement agencies report crime data today, encompassing over 95 percent of the population in the United States. The result is the Uniform Crime Reports.

Every year, the FBI publishes a summary of these crime data in a report titled Crime in the United States. There are three primary components to this report: the number of crimes reported to the police, the number of people arrested, and the number of law enforcement personnel employed in the United States. This report contains nationwide summaries of these three components as well as local statistics for each city and town. A major challenge for the FBI was to standardize the information that was being reported, because each state has different definitions for what constitutes various crimes. To this end, the Uniform Crime Reports covers twenty-nine offense categories that are separated into two major categories of crimes. The two categories are Part I and Part II offenses.

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