FBI Releases Crime Statistics

On 30 September, the FBI released the 2018 edition of Crime in the United States. An announcement on the report describes it as “a statistical compilation of offense, arrest, and police employee data reported by law enforcement agencies voluntarily participating in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program.” Overall, 16,659 agencies out of a total of 18,586 eligible agencies reported data; the FBI compiled the responses and used statistical methods to estimate total crime rates.

In the report, robbery, aggravated assault, rape, and murder and nonnegligent manslaughter are considered violent crime. The FBI estimates there were 1.2 million violent crimes in 2018, or a rate of 368.9 violent crimes per 100,000 population. This represents a 3.9 percent decline in the violent crime rate compared to 2017. In general, the violent crime rate has decreased slowly over the past decade, though the 2018 rate is still slightly higher than the 10-year low, which was 361.6 in 2014.

Property crime, which includes burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson, continued its steady decline in 2018. There were 7.2 million estimated incidents of property crime, yielding a property crime rate of 2,199.5 per 100,000 population. Compared to 2017, this is a decline of 6.9 percent.

The report also tallies the number of law enforcement personnel in two categories: sworn officers and civilian employees.

Nationwide, there were 2.4 sworn officers per 1,000 population in 2018. Large cities (population 250,000 or more) employed 2.5 sworn officers per 1,000 population; small cities (population less than 10,000) employed 3.8; and those in between employed less than 2.0. Overall, 12.6 percent of sworn officers were female. The more urban the population, the more female officers: 18.2 percent in cities with a population 1 million or more; 8.1 percent in regions described as “nonmetropolitan counties.”