The Uniform Crime Reports, comprised of six databases, includes crime information reported to the FBI by law enforcement agencies around the country. Most of the data consist of the "index" crimes: murder, nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, motor-vehicle theft and arson. These crimes, with the exception of arson, were chosen in 1929 to serve as an index for gauging fluctuations in the overall volume and rate of crime. Arson was added by Congressional mandate in 1979.
During the early planning of the program, it was recognized that the differences among criminal codes precluded a mere aggregation of state statistics to arrive at a national total. Further, because of the variances in punishment for the same offenses in different state codes, no distinction between felony and misdemeanor crimes was possible.
All databases in the Uniform Crime Reports, except the Supplemental Homicide Report (SHR), are arranged by police reporting agencies. Occurrences are presented as aggregates. The data is broken down by month. All the databases provide the region, state, county, city, metropolitan statistical area (MSA) and reporting agency identifier.
Contact the database library if you are interested in a state slice, or a single database (such as the SHR).
Record layouts and samples of this database
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