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Homicide trends in the U.S.
Additional information about the dataData sources | Methodology | Related sites The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) Launched over 70 years ago, the Uniform Crime Reporting Program collects and publishes criminal offense, arrest, and law enforcement personnel statistics. Under the UCR program, law enforcement agencies submit information to the FBI monthly. Offense information is collected on the eight Index offenses of homicide, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson. Information on the number of persons arrested includes many additional crime types such as drug abuse violations and driving under the influence. The FBI annually publishes data from the UCR in Crime in the United States. The UCR is one of the two major national indicators about crime. For more information about these two indicators, see The Nation's Two Crime Measures. The UCR program collects only those data which come to the attention of law enforcement through victim reports or observation. Of all the crimes included in the UCR, homicide is the most complete. Homicide counts suffer from a minimal level of underreporting. In addition, the number of crimes where law enforcement makes an arrest or clears the offense is the highest for homicide compared to the other serious offenses collected by the UCR. Other offenses including forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault are currently available only in summary count form without details about the incident, victims, or offenders. Homicide information -- through the Supplementary Homicide Reports data -- is available in incident form. FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) Most of the data used here are from the Supplementary Homicide Reports which is a part of the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. Supplemental data about homicide incidents are submitted monthly with detail on location, victim, and offender characteristics. These reports include information on the month and year of an offense, on the reporting agency and its residential population, county and Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) codes, geographic division, and population group, on the age, race, and sex of victims and offenders, and on the victim/offender relationship, weapon use, and circumstance of the crime. For the years 1976-2005, contributing agencies provided supplemental data for 538,210 of the estimated 594,277 murders. Supplemental data were also reported for 597,359 of the estimated 659,862 offenders. Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) Also a part of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, LEOKA utilizes data from several sources including the Uniform Crime Reports. Once notified of a line-of-duty death, the FBI contacts the employing agency to obtain additional details. LEOKA includes data about Federal, State, and local law enforcement officers who were killed feloniously or by accidents or who were assaulted. An annual report is published by the FBI. Homicide as defined here includes murder and nonnegligent manslaughter which is the willful killing of one human being by another. The general analyses excluded deaths caused by negligence, suicide, or accident; justifiable homicides; and attempts to murder. Justifiable homicides based on the reports of law enforcement agencies are analyzed separately. Deaths from the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01 are not included in any of the analyses although they are available on the data file on which the analyses are based. These data are based solely on police investigation, as opposed to the determination of a court, medical examiner, coroner, jury, or other judicial body. Not all agencies which report offense information to the FBI also submit supplemental data on homicides. About 91% of homicides reported in the UCR are included in the SHR. To account for the total number of homicides, this analysis weighted the SHR data to match national and State estimates prepared by the FBI. All victim-based analyses are adjusted in this manner. While many agencies report supplemental data on homicides, much of the data concerning offenders may not be reported because no suspects were identified. The most significant problem in using SHR data to analyze offender characteristics is the sizable and growing number of unsolved homicides contained in the data file. Ignoring unsolved homicides, of course, would seriously understate calculated rates of offending by particular subgroups of the population, distort trends over time among these same subgroups, and bias observed patterns of offending to the extent that the rate of missing offender data is associated with offender characteristics. To adjust for unsolved homicides, a method for offender imputation has been devised, using available information about the victims murdered in both solved and unsolved homicides. Through this imputation algorithm, the demographic characteristics of unidentified offenders are inferred on the basis of similar homicide cases -- similar in terms of the victim's demographic profile, circumstances of the homicide such as felony or argument, location of the homicide (region and urbaness), gun involvement, and year of the offense -- that had been solved. In other words, offender profiles for unsolved crimes are estimated based on the offender profiles in solved cases matched on victim age, sex, and race; circumstances of the homicide; location of the homicide; and gun involvement; as well as year. All offender-based estimates were imputed using this procedure.  To more detail on the weighting and imputation procedures
The data file analyzed is available from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD). To analyze these data online, go to the NACJD Data Analysis System. Bureau of Justice Statistics
Federal Bureau of Investigation - Uniform Crime Reports National Institute of Justice - Homicide in Eight U.S. Cities (Acrobat file) Statistical Briefing Book from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention National Archive of Criminal Justice Data |
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