Criminology The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program was set up by the International

Association of Chiefs of Police in 1929 to produce reliable and uniform crime statistics for the country (FBI 2004). The task of collecting, publishing and archiving these statistics first belonged to the FBI. At present, these data come from almost 17,000 law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S.A. There are also annual publications that gather and print specialized facets of crime, such as hate crime, murder an assaults of law enforcement officers, special studies, reports and monographs.

Uniform Crime Reports provide periodic nationwide assessments of reported crimes not available in the criminal justice system (National Archive of Criminal Justice Data) from approximately 17,000 law enforcement agencies directly r through state reporting programs. Data are classified into agency-level, incident-level, and county-level. Agency-level data consist of five types, such as offenses known and clearances by arrest; property stolen and recovered; supplementary homicide; police employee and hate crimes (NACJD). Known offenses and clearance by arrest data consist of reports of index crimes recorded monthly. Property stolen and recovered data, done monthly, consist of the nature of the crime, the monetary value and type of the stolen property. Supplementary homicide reports are incident-based, describing the victim, the offender, the relationship between them, the weapon used and the circumstances. Police employee data relay in-depth circumstances, type of call answered, weapon used and the responding patrol officers. And hate crime data include evidence of prejudice as to race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and mental or physical disabilities. FBI information on hate crimes includes the number of victims and offenders, the type of victim, bias motivation, type of offense and the place.

Incident-level Data are collected through the NIBRS component of the Uniform Crime Reports on each incident and arrest within 22 offense categories, in turn made up of Group A and Group B. offenses. And county-level files contain arrests and crimes data distributed years as arrests in all ages, juvenile and adult arrests and crimes reported. These county data emanate...

NACJD puts in the missing data and aggregates these to the county-level.
In contrast, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) evolves from respondent reports from longitudinal survey of representative sample the U.S. population (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2001). These reflect attributes of housing units, households, individuals and crime incidents, such as assaults, larcenies, and robberies, according to seriousness of the incident; attributes of the victim and the offender; their relationship; the location; defensive reaction of the victim during the incident; witnesses; and police involvement (BJS).

These public and web-accessible data contain only a limited set of variables that describe the location of respondents. A restricted version contains the same but detailed geographic identifiers to the census level for sampled housing units. These allow the analysis of crime victimization, which includes different variables characterizing the respondent's residence. Respondents in select housing units are surveyed every six months every 3 and a half years (BJS). In 1992, the survey was redesigned to benefit probes of elicit victim reports of incidents involving intimates, family members of other known persons. There is an initial bounding when a housing unit is included in the sample, establishing the base of the incidents that occurred before the first survey and excluded in the data. Reported incidents are henceforth assessed and those previously reported in an earlier survey are excluded from the data.

Bibliography

Bureau of Justice Statistics (2001). National Crime Victimization Survey. U.S. Department of Justice. http://www.ncovr.org/docs/Data_Docs/NCVS.htm

Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2004). Uniform Crime Reports. http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm

National Archive of Criminal Justice. Uniform Crime Reporting Program Resource Guide. Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, University of Michigan. http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/NACJD/NCVS

In 1994, a new imputation algorithm was implemented for UCRs, so that data files before that year are not comparable to those after 1994. Researchers are asked to study yearly documentation…