Part I, Criminal Offenses

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) designates certain crimes as Part I or index offenses because it considers them to be the major crimes plaguing society in the United States.

• Murder is the unlawful killing of one human being by another. In 2011, 128,541 murders came to the attention of police departments in the United States. First-degree murder is premeditated, deliberate criminal homicide. Second-degree murder is an intentional killing that is generally unplanned and may happen “in the heat of passion.” Firearms are the weapon of choice in most murders. 
   
  
• Forcible rape is “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” Statutory rape differs from forcible rape in that it involves sex with a female who is under majority age. Forcible rape is the least reported of all violent crimes. Estimates are that 40% of all rapes are not reported by the victims.
  
  
• Robbery is the unlawful taking or attempted taking of property that is in the possession of another, by force or the threat of force. Guns are fired in 30% of robberies, US wide. In Canada, Robbery is the most prevalent of all crimes, followed by a variety of other property associated crimes. 
   
  
• Aggravated assault involves the unlawful, intentional inflicting, or attempted or threatened inflicting, of injury upon another person. In an aggravated assault, the perpetrator either uses a weapon or hurts the victim so badly that the victim requires medical assistance. In some States Assault has several definitions, where elements of crimes are either more or less penalized, i.e., Assault 1^st Degree, Assault 2^nd Degree, etc.
  
• Burglary is unlawful entry of a structure, vehicle, or vessel without force, with intent to commit a felony. Now this also includes motor vehicles, which was previously called “car prowl.”
  
  
• Larceny-theft is the unlawful taking or attempted taking of property from the possession of another, by stealth, without force, with intent to permanently deprive the owner of the property. It includes such crimes as shoplifting, pocket picking, purse snatching, and bike stealing. Larceny-theft makes up over 50%of the crime committed annually in the United States, making it the largest crime category. 
   
  
• Motor vehicle theft is the unlawful taking or attempted taking of a vehicle owned by another with the intent to deprive the owner of it. This definition is not to be confused with Car Jacking, which is on the rise in all American States, but is almost nonexistent in Canada, or Europe. 
   
  
• Arson is the burning or attempted burning of property with or without the intent to defraud.
  

Sources of Information on Crime

Two sources of information, compiled by the federal government, provide data on crime in the United States. The FBI produces its annual Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), giving estimates of arrests and crimes reported to the police. The U.S. Justice Department also conducts an annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which is the product of an annual random sampling of households. The Victimization Survey picks up crimes not reported to the police.

The UCR

The UCR reports Part I crimes in terms of both crimes known to the police and arrests. Part I crimes are reported in terms of arrests. Part II includes, but is not limited to, some victimless crimes. Since citizens often don't report victimless crimes and police find them difficult to detect, it makes sense to use arrest statistics for information on this type of crime. During 1996, law enforcement agencies made about 15 million arrests for Part II crimes. The highest arrest counts were for drug abuse violations, larceny-thefts, and driving under the influence, each at 1.5 million.

One of the UCR's key features is the Crime Index, which is the sum of Part I crimes for a given year. In 1996, the Crime Index was 13.5 million offenses. Nonviolent property crimes made up almost 90 percent of the total number of index offenses. 
 
The crime rate, or the number of Part I offenses that occurred in a given area for every 100,000 people living in the area, is calculated as follows: total Crime Index divided by population multiplied by 100,000 equals crime rate. The UCR also figures crime rates for specific crimes. For example, the national murder rate in 1997 was 770 murders per 100,000 people. 
 
What does it mean when the official Part I crime rate increases? One or more of three things can be happening:

• More people are committing crimes.
  
  
• Offenders have higher individual crime rates.
  
  
• A higher proportion of crimes committed are being reported or recorded.
  

An advantage of the UCR is that it includes homicides in its calculation of the violent crime rate (which the NCVS by its nature cannot). The main disadvantage of the UCR is that much crime is never reported to the police and never shows up in the UCR. Thus, UCR estimates of the volume and rates of crime are always lower than the actual frequencies of such occurrences because crime is subject to both nonreporting by citizens and nonrecording by the police. Trends in official statistics may be the result of changes in public reporting and police recording practices, not of actual changes in the amount of crime.

The NCVS

The NCVS is an ongoing survey of households that consists of interviews with 100,000 persons in 50,000 households twice each year. It asks residents of the United States about their victimizations from crime and reports on rape, sexual assault, robbery, both simple and aggravated assault, theft, household burglary, and motor vehicle theft. It omits murder and drug crimes. The latter is an important omission because a shift in criminal activity from an included crime (for example, burglary or robbery) to drug dealing would appear as a decrease in the overall crime rate when no actual decrease had occurred. NCVS data reveal the following facts about crime and victimization.

• The actual amount of crime is several times greater than the UCR shows.
  
  
• Crime touches about 23 million households in the United States each year.
  
  
• The total personal cost of crime to victims is about $13 billion each year.
  
  
• The chance of being the victim of a violent crime is much higher for young African-American males than for any other group of the population.
  
  
• Violent criminal victimizations are extremely rare events.
  
  
• Most crimes against individuals are absorbed by the victims without reporting them to the police.
  

Drawbacks to this report are that some people may incorrectly remember events as crimes that were not crimes and the high cost of door-to-door interviewing.

Crime Decreases

One of the bigger myths about crime is that it is always increasing. The 2008 UCR shows that serious crime fell across the nation in 2007, the sixth consecutive annual decrease. Violent crimes declined by 5 %, led by 9 % decreases in murders and robberies. Property crimes declined by 18%, led by an 18 % drop in arson. Similarly, the NCVS shows that the number of violent crimes fell more than 11% in 2005. Violent victimizations dropped from 13.9 million in 2004 to 11.9 million in 2005. Property crimes continued a 20-year pattern of decreasing rates. Why is crime decreasing?

A strong economy

The booming economy of the 2000s has helped to reduce crime rates. It has provided legitimate jobs to some urban young people who had worked in the drug trade.

Changing demographics

The age distribution in the United States has been changing. In 1997, more than 20 million people were between 15 and 19 years old. By 2007, that population group had dropped to 17.5 million. Similar drops have occurred in the 20–24 age group, a group with a high crime potential. Overall, the nation is aging, and older men don't commit as much crime as younger men.

Police manipulation of crime data

Senior police officials around the nation voiced concern in 2008 that the sharp drop in crime in the 1990s had produced pressure on police departments to show ever-decreasing crime statistics. In 20088, charges were leveled against police officials in New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Boca Raton for falsely reporting crime statistics.

A common thread running through many of the incidents of police officials' alteration of crime statistics is that police commanders responded to pressure from politicians, the media, and the public to lower crime rates by downgrading felonies by intentionally mislabeling felonies, such as aggravated assault and burglary, as misdemeanors. Such a practice deflates rates of serious crimes and inflates rates of non serious crimes. Experts say they believe these incidents do not mean that the nationwide drop in crime is illusory. They point to the fact that victimization data, which are not subject to police manipulation, indicate the same downward trend as the FBI's UCR.