With the release of Crime in the United States, 2005, the FBI debuts an improved Web publication of its annual uniform crime report. Crime in the United States, 2005, includes tables grouped by topic, "browse by" options for major areas of interest, bulleted overviews for each main topic and most tables, and "data declarations" for each table to provide pertinent information that may help users understand the data presented.
Since 1996, editions of Crime in the United States have been available on the FBI's Web site www.fbi.gov, first in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), and more recently in the PDF and HyperText Markup Language (HTML) files. We, the FBI, hope this redesigned electronic version will better meet the needs of law enforcement, criminologists, sociologists, legislators, municipal planners, the media, and other students of criminal justice who use the statistics for varied adminstrative, research, and planning purposes.
Crime in the United States, 2005, presents 81 data tables containing information on the following topics:
Offenses known to police—This includes information about violent crime offenses (murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assualt), and property crime offenses (burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson).
Also included are clearance data (information about crimes "solved" either by arrest or exceptional means).
Persons arrested—Number of arrests made by law enforcement and the age, gender, and race of arrestees for the 29 offenses (see Offense Definitions) for which the UCR Program collects data.
Police employees—Information regarding sworn officers and civilian law enforcement personnel.
In addition to these tables, Crime in the United States offers information about murder victims, offenders, and circumstances from Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) provided by law enforcement agencies. (See Expanded Homicide Data).
Also, you can download Microsoft Excel spreadsheets of the data tables and Microsoft Word documents of much of the text presented.
The table below shows the number of law enforcement agencies contributing data to the UCR Program within each population group for 2005. Information published in Crime in the United States, 2005, reflects data from these agencies.
| Population Group | Number of Agencies | Population Covered |
|---|---|---|
| I (250,000 inhabitants and more) | 70 | 53,583,154 |
| II (100,000 to 249,999 inhabitants) | 187 | 28,055,458 |
| III (50,000 to 99,999 inhabitants) | 451 | 30,837,315 |
| IV (25,000 to 49,999 inhabitants) | 826 | 28,453,837 |
| V (10,000 to 24,999 inhabitants) | 1,895 | 30,045,724 |
| VI 1 (Less than 10,000 inhabitants) | 8,862 | 26,316,456 |
| VIII (Nonmetropolitan County)2 | 3,016 | 30,609,555 |
| IX (Metropolitan County)2 | 2,149 | 68,508,905 |
| Total | 17,456 | 296,410,404 |
1 Includes universities and colleges to which no population is attributed.
2 Includes state police to which no population is attributed.
For more information about how the UCR Program collects data, see About the Uniform Crime Reporting Program.
The E-Government Act of 2002 (E-Gov), enacted by Congress, promotes more efficient uses of information technology by the federal government. We welcome your feedback via our short evaluation form. Your comments will help us improve the presentation of future releases of Crime in the United States.
Preliminary hate crime statistics. In previous years, Crime in the United States included preliminary data for a given year's release of hate crime information from the UCR Program. Final statistics, available in the Hate Crime Statistics annual report, are published soon after the release of Crime in the United States. Therefore, preliminary hate crime data are no longer part of this publication. Hate Crime Statistics, 2005, will be available at www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm.
Rankings by crime levels. Any comparisons of crime among different locales should take into consideration numerous other factors besides the areas' crime statistics. Therefore, the UCR Program does not provide rankings of localities by crime levels. Variables Affecting Crime provides more details concerning the proper use of UCR statistics.
Information about unreported crime. Crime in the United States features data collected from law enforcement agencies regarding only those offenses made known to police. However, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), another agency within Department of Justice, administers the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Using data from the NCVS, the BJS publishes information regarding crimes not reported to the police. For more information about the NCVS and how its data differ from information presented in Crime in the United States, see The Nation's Two Crime Measures.
County crime totals and "raw data". Crime in the United States offers crime data from local law enforcement agencies and county law enforcement agencies in separate tables. These data broken down by each agency within a county (Crime by County) and other 2005 "raw data" from the UCR Program's master files will be available in spring 2007. For more information, contact the Communications Unit of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division via e-mail at cjis_comm@leo.gov or by telephone at (304) 625 4995.
Special studies. In previous years, Crime in the United States included special studies analyzing UCR data. Such studies are now released separately from Crime in the United States as monographs.
Crime data for 2006. Preliminary statistics for January through June 2006 will be available on the Web in December 2006, and preliminary statistics for all of 2006 will be available in the spring of 2007. Crime in the United States, 2006, will be published on the Web in the fall of 2007.