Since 1996, editions of Crime in the United States have been available on the FBI’s Web site www.fbi.gov, first in Portable Document Format (PDF) files, and more recently in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) files. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) staff are committed to improving its annual publications so that the data it collects can 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 administrative, research, and planning purposes. For more information about how the UCR Program collects data, see About the Uniform Crime Reporting Program.
Crime in the United States, 2007, presents data tables containing information on the topics listed below. Data users can download Microsoft Excel spreadsheets of the data tables and Microsoft Word documents of much of the texts presented.
Offenses Known to Law Enforcement—Includes information about violent crime offenses (murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault), and property crime offenses (burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson).
Expanded offense data includes additional data that the Program collects on the eight offenses. Depending on the offense, these details may include the type of weapon and the type and value of items stolen. For the offense of murder, expanded homicide data includes information about murder victims, offenders, and circumstances that are collected on the Supplementary Homicide Report.
Clearance data includes
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 arrest data.
Police employees—Information regarding sworn officers and civilian law enforcement personnel.
The table below shows the number of law enforcement agencies contributing data to the UCR Program within each population group for 2007. Information published in Crime in the United States, 2007, reflects data from these agencies.
| Population Group | Number of Agencies | Population Covered |
|---|---|---|
| I (250,000 inhabitants and more) | 73 | 54,837,759 |
| II (100,000 to 249,999 inhabitants) | 189 | 28,430,342 |
| III (50,000 to 99,999 inhabitants) | 472 | 32,458,407 |
| IV (25,000 to 49,999 inhabitants) | 848 | 29,149,912 |
| V (10,000 to 24,999 inhabitants) | 1,907 | 30,267,100 |
| VI 1 and VII1, 2 (Less than 10,000 inhabitants) | 9,022 | 26,467,089 |
| VIII (Nonmetropolitan County)2 | 3,054 | 30,492,750 |
| IX (Metropolitan County)2 | 2,173 | 69,517,798 |
| Total | 17,738 | 301,621,157 |
1 Includes universities and colleges to which no population
is attributed.
2 Includes state police to which no population is attributed.
In 2007, approximately 38 percent of the Nation’s law enforcement agencies participating in the UCR Program submitted their data via the NIBRS, and the crime data collected via the NIBRS comprised approximately 25 percent of the data submitted to the FBI. The jurisdictions that reported crime data to the FBI via the NIBRS covered approximately 25 percent of the Nation’s population.
The E-Government Act of 2002 (E-Gov), enacted by Congress, promotes more efficient uses of information technology by the federal government. This Web publication is a result of the UCR Program’s response to that Act. 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.
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 the 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 and county law enforcement agencies in separate tables. These data, which are also presented individually within a county (Crime by County), and other 2007 “raw data” from the UCR Program’s master files will be available sometime after the release of the 2007 publication. For more information, contact 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 on www.fbi.gov.
Crime data for 2008—Preliminary statistics for January through June 2008 and for all of 2008 will be available on the Web in December 2008 and in June 2009, respectively. Crime in the United States, 2008, will be published on the Web in the fall of 2009.
A suggested citation style follows for data users who need to reference information from this report:
United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. (September 2008). Crime in the United States, 2007. Retrieved (insert date), from http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/07cius.htm.
Roll over table numbers for table titles.
Expanded Offense Data Tables
Expanded Homicide Data Tables