Crime Research

Crime analysis is a law enforcement function that involves systematic analysis for identifying and analyzing patterns and trends in crime and disorder.

Crime statistics often are confusing, misleading and incomplete - and rarely more so than at the start of a new year, when cities start reporting last year's crime totals. Numbers out this week show a surge in homicides in many cities, adding urgency to the usual early-January headlines, but you should view them with extreme skepticism.

There's good news for some states, bad news for others, and some crime-rate surprises in places you'd never expect.

One would think that with the dramatic drop in crime, America's communities would be reveling in the streets as though it were Mardi Gras, or at least talking about how much safer they feel walking around their neighborhoods as adults than they felt walking the streets as teenagers. But decades of Gallup polls indicate otherwise.

Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has just published a table of statistics on race and violent crime that she received from the Department of Justice. For the first time in figures of this kind, DOJ has treated Hispanics as a separate category rather than lumping them in with whites. These data cover all violent crimes except murder, but the number of murders is tiny compared to other violent crimes.

The statistical overviews below represent a snapshot of recent findings about the status of crime in the United States. Data is drawn largely from two national, annual reports--the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)--which measure the scope, magnitude, and impact of crime in the United States.

There are two primary sources for crime data in the United States. The first is crime reported to law enforcement agencies, processed at the state level and reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Many criminologists see this data as an index of serious crimes.

Wikipedia's information about crime statistics.

NIJ's research in transnational crime seeks to measure the extent of crime, provide suggestions for allocating law enforcement, assess how illegal networks operate, and anticipate the movement of crime groups in the future.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 7.4% of high school students in 2011 reported being threatened or harmed with a weapon on school grounds.

We regularly publish or contribute to a series of statistical crime reports and publications, detailing specific offenses and outlining trends that can help you better understand crime threats both nationally and locally.