Assault, Aggravated

Aggravated assault is a form of interpersonal violence that involves either serious injury to the victim or the threat of force by means of a weapon. It is defined in various ways by state statutes and criminal justice agencies, but is usually distinguished from simple assault by the degree of injury to the victim and the seriousness of the threat. Nationwide information on aggravated assault is provided by two primary sources of information: the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and the Bureau of lustice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

In the UCR, aggravated assault is an unlawful attack with the intent of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury. The definition also adds that the attack is usually accompanied by the use of a weapon or by other methods intended to produce death or great bodily harm. Therefore, aggravated assault, as a class of crime, stands between simple assault and homicide, depending on the amount of physical injury to the victim and the means by which the attack was carried out.

The UCR provides two kinds of information on aggravated assault: (1) its incidence, based on the number of such crimes recorded or “known” by the police; and (2) the characteristics of persons arrested. A preliminary count from the 2005 UCR findings showed a 1.9% increase, or about 871,000 aggravated assaults. This increase is an interruption of an 11-year decline in aggravated assault, a downward trend also exhibited by the three other major crimes of violence reported by the UCR, namely, homicide, forcible rape, and robbery.

Rates for the incidence of aggravated assault are unequally distributed by location, and these patterns have been consistent over the years. For example, in 2004, aggravated assault rates were higher in metropolitan areas (309 per 100,000 inhabitants) than in cities outside of metropolitan areas (277) and non-metropolitan counties (158). The Southern region shows the highest aggravated assault rate at 354 per 100,000 persons, followed by the West at 305, the Midwest at 233, and the Northeast at 221. Yet, the method used to inflict bodily harm varies little by locality. Slightly over one third of all police-recorded aggravated assaults involve clubs or other blunt objects. Hands, fists, and feet are used as weapons in about one in four assaults, and in slightly less than one in five assaults firearms and knives or other cutting instruments are used.

There were slightly over 438,000 arrests for aggravated assault in 2004. This number is slightly less than the year before, and represents a 14% decrease since 1995, a decline consonant with the long-term downward trend in the incidence of aggravated assault. Regionally, it is the West, not the South, that consistently shows the highest arrest rate. For example, in 2004, the arrest rate was 213 per 100,000 persons in the West, compared to 136 in the South, 115 in the Midwest, and 114 in the Northeast. About 90% of aggravated assault arrestees are male and 14% are under the age of 18. These percentages have changed only minimally over the past decade.

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