Uniform Crime Reports

The Uniform Crime Report (UCR) program, administered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) since its inception in 1930, is a nationwide system for the collection, analysis, and public reporting of data concerning crimes and arrests reported to police. The UCR program has grown tremendously since 1930, when approximately 400 police agencies in 43 states participated; today, more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies representing jurisdictions in all 50 states participate voluntarily in the UCR program. The program has also undergone a series of enhancements and improvements in its data collection, definition, analysis, and reporting techniques over the years, and in 1989, a dramatically improved National Incident-Based Reporting System was implemented to correct various deficiencies and generally improve the usefulness of UCR as a measure of crime and police activity.

The creation of the UCR system can be traced to the activities of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and that organization's recognition of the need to quantify and publicly report on various standardized measures of police performance. The IACP's leadership, which included August Vollmer and O. W. Wilson, was also influenced by the basic principles of scientific management as espoused by Frederick Winslow Taylor, and they campaigned for a standardized system to measure and compare interagency performance. In this regard, the UCR can be seen as one of policing's earliest attempts at comparative performance management. Prior to the UCR, there existed no systematic process with which to gauge the performance of different police agencies, particularly in the area of crime control. Various agencies prepared annual reports or other statistical reports on crime and other measures of police performance, but these reports varied greatly in terms of the type and quality of crime-related data they presented, making interagency comparisons difficult at best. Further compounding the problem of standardized measurement was the fact that various state penal laws classified offenses according to different criteria: The penal code definition of grand larceny in one state, for example, might differ significantly from the definition in other states. This necessitated the creation of an entirely new set of offense definitions, based on an internal FBI classification system, that could be applied across all states and all jurisdictions.

The UCR uses two primary categories or indexes for crime and arrest data. The Part I Index is the best known and most frequently cited statistic, and it [Page 476]consists of the seven major offenses of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Although arson was added to the list of Part I offenses in 1979 as an eighth offense category, it is not included in many or most discussions of serious Part I Index crimes. Part II offenses cover simple assault, curfew offenses, loitering, fraud, forgery and counterfeiting, disorderly conduct, embezzlement, driving under the influence, drug offenses, gambling, liquor offenses, offenses against the family, prostitution, public drunkenness, sex offenses, stolen property, vandalism, vagrancy, and weapons offenses. The UCR data for Part II offenses are derived from reports of arrests made (rather than crimes reported), because many of these offenses are not reported to the police as crimes. The FBI further categorizes Part I Index crimes in the Violent Crime Index, comprising the sum of all reported offenses in the murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault categories, and the Property Crime Index, comprising all reported burglary, lar-ceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft offenses.

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