FBI: 4.5 Million Committed Criminal Acts in 2013

The FBI has released details on more than 5.6 million criminal offenses reported via the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) in 2013. The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program’s latest report, NIBRS 2013, provides a diverse scope of information about victims, known offenders, and relationships for 23 offense categories (including sex offenses). It also presents arrest data for those offense categories plus 11 more.

Unlike data reported via the Summary Reporting System in Crime in the United States, data in NIBRS 2013 include all offenses within an incident, as well as additional aspects about each event such as location, time of day, and clearances. NIBRS 2013 also provides agency-level offense data by state; however, there are no estimates for agencies that did not submit NIBRS data to the UCR Program.

In 2013, 6,328 law enforcement agencies, representing coverage for more than 92 million U.S. inhabitants, submitted NIBRS data. While not yet nationally representative, this coverage represents 34.4 percent of all law enforcement agencies that participate in the UCR Program.

NIBRS agencies reported 4,927,535 incidents that involved 5,665,902 offenses, 5,980,569 victims, and 4,517,902 known offenders. In addition, these agencies reported 1,533,671 arrestees.

Of the reported offenses, 64.7 percent involved crimes against property (i.e., those crimes in which the object is property), 22.8 percent involved crimes against persons, (i.e., crimes whose victims are always individuals), and 12.6 percent included crimes against society (i.e., typically “victimless crimes” that represent society’s prohibition against engaging in certain types of activity, such as gambling).

NIBRS victim types, collected for all reported offenses, may be an individual, a business, an institution, or society as a whole. Of the 4,224,061 individual victims reported in 2013, 24.2 percent were between the ages of 21 and 30 years of age. Half (50.9 percent) were female, 48.3 percent were male, and sex was unknown for 0.8 percent. The majority (72.3 percent) were white, 21.1 percent were black or African-American, 1.2 percent were Asian, 0.5 percent were American Indian or Alaska Native, and less than 0.1 percent were Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. Race was unknown for 4.8 percent of victims.

In 2013, there were 4,517,902 known offenders, meaning that some aspect of the suspect—such as the age, sex, or race—was identified and reported. Of these, nearly a third (33.1 percent) were between 16 and 25 years of age. By gender, 63.9 percent were male, and 25.0 percent were female; gender was unknown for 11.1 percent. By race, the majority (56.5 percent) of known offenders were white, 28.1 percent were black or African-American, and 1.6 percent were of other races. The race was unknown for 13.8 percent of reported known offenders.

Concerning the relationship of victims to offenders, there were 1,305,497 victims of known offenders of crimes against persons (e.g., murders, sex offenses, assault offenses) and robbery offenses from the crimes against property category. Of these, 52.8 percent of victims knew their offenders (or at least one offender where more than one was present) but did not have a familial relationship to them. Nearly a quarter (24.8 percent) of victims were related to their offenders (or at least one offender where more than one was present).

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