In 2023, the violent crime rate in the United States was 363.8 cases per 100,000 of the population. Even though the violent crime rate has been decreasing since 1990, the United States tops the ranking of countries with the most prisoners. In addition, due to the FBI's transition to a new crime reporting system in which law enforcement agencies voluntarily submit crime reports, data may not accurately reflect the total number of crimes committed in recent years. Reported violent crime rate in the United States The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation tracks the rate of reported violent crimes per 100,000 U.S. inhabitants. In the timeline above, rates are shown starting in 1990. The rate of reported violent crime has fallen since a high of 758.20 reported crimes in 1991 to a low of 363.6 reported violent crimes in 2014. In 2023, there were around 1.22 million violent crimes reported to the FBI in the United States. This number can be compared to the total number of property crimes, roughly 6.41 million that year. Of violent crimes in 2023, aggravated assaults were the most common offenses in the United States, while homicide offenses were the least common. Law enforcement officers and crime clearance Though the violent crime rate was down in 2013, the number of law enforcement officers also fell. Between 2005 and 2009, the number of law enforcement officers in the United States rose from around 673,100 to 708,800. However, since 2009, the number of officers fell to a low of 626,900 officers in 2013. The number of law enforcement officers has since grown, reaching 720,652 in 2023. In 2023, the crime clearance rate in the U.S. was highest for murder and non-negligent manslaughter charges, with around 57.8 percent of murders being solved by investigators and a suspect being charged with the crime. Additionally, roughly 46.1 percent of aggravated assaults were cleared in that year. A statistics report on violent crime in the U.S. can be found here.

Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 1,173 civilians having been shot, 248 of whom were Black, as of December 2024. In 2023, there were 1,164 fatal police shootings. Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 6.1 fatal shootings per million of the population per year between 2015 and 2024. Police brutality in the U.S. In recent years, particularly since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, police brutality has become a hot button issue in the United States. The number of homicides committed by police in the United States is often compared to those in countries such as England, where the number is significantly lower. Black Lives Matter The Black Lives Matter Movement, formed in 2013, has been a vocal part of the movement against police brutality in the U.S. by organizing “die-ins”, marches, and demonstrations in response to the killings of black men and women by police. While Black Lives Matter has become a controversial movement within the U.S., it has brought more attention to the number and frequency of police shootings of civilians.

Number of homicide victims, by method used to commit the homicide (total methods used; shooting; stabbing; beating; strangulation; fire (burns or suffocation); other methods used; methods used unknown), Canada, 1974 to 2023.

Victims of gang-related homicides (total number of homicide victims; number of homicide victims - unknown gang-relation; number of homicide victims - known gang relation; number of gang-related homicide victims; percentage of gang-related homicide victims; rate (per 100,000 population) of gang-related homicide victims), Canada and regions, 1999 to 2023.

For any questions about this data please email me at jacob@crimedatatool.com. If you use this data, please cite it.Version 6 release notes:Adds 2018 dataVersion 5 release notes:Adds data in the following formats: SPSS, SAS, and Excel.Changes project name to avoid confusing this data for the ones done by NACJD.Adds data for 1991.Fixes bug where bias motivation "anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, mixed group (lgbt)" was labeled "anti-homosexual (gay and lesbian)" prior to 2013 causing there to be two columns and zero values for years with the wrong label.All data is now directly from the FBI, not NACJD. The data initially comes as ASCII+SPSS Setup files and read into R using the package asciiSetupReader. All work to clean the data and save it in various file formats was also done in R. For the R code used to clean this data, see here. https://github.com/jacobkap/crime_data. Version 4 release notes: Adds data for 2017.Adds rows that submitted a zero-report (i.e. that agency reported no hate crimes in the year). This is for all years 1992-2017. Made changes to categorical variables (e.g. bias motivation columns) to make categories consistent over time. Different years had slightly different names (e.g. 'anti-am indian' and 'anti-american indian') which I made consistent. Made the 'population' column which is the total population in that agency. Version 3 release notes: Adds data for 2016.Order rows by year (descending) and ORI.Version 2 release notes: Fix bug where Philadelphia Police Department had incorrect FIPS county code. The Hate Crime data is an FBI data set that is part of the annual Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program data. This data contains information about hate crimes reported in the United States. Please note that the files are quite large and may take some time to open.Each row indicates a hate crime incident for an agency in a given year. I have made a unique ID column ("unique_id") by combining the year, agency ORI9 (the 9 character Originating Identifier code), and incident number columns together. Each column is a variable related to that incident or to the reporting agency. Some of the important columns are the incident date, what crime occurred (up to 10 crimes), the number of victims for each of these crimes, the bias motivation for each of these crimes, and the location of each crime. It also includes the total number of victims, total number of offenders, and race of offenders (as a group). Finally, it has a number of columns indicating if the victim for each offense was a certain type of victim or not (e.g. individual victim, business victim religious victim, etc.). The only changes I made to the data are the following. Minor changes to column names to make all column names 32 characters or fewer (so it can be saved in a Stata format), changed the name of some UCR offense codes (e.g. from "agg asslt" to "aggravated assault"), made all character values lower case, reordered columns. I also added state, county, and place FIPS code from the LEAIC (crosswalk) and generated incident month, weekday, and month-day variables from the incident date variable included in the original data.

!!!WARNING~~~This dataset has a large number of flaws and is unable to properly answer many questions that people generally use it to answer, such as whether national hate crimes are changing (or at least they use the data so improperly that they get the wrong answer). A large number of people using this data (academics, advocates, reporting, US Congress) do so inappropriately and get the wrong answer to their questions as a result. Indeed, many published papers using this data should be retracted. Before using this data I highly recommend that you thoroughly read my book on UCR data, particularly the chapter on hate crimes (https://ucrbook.com/hate-crimes.html) as well as the FBI's own manual on this data. The questions you could potentially answer well are relatively narrow and generally exclude any causal relationships. ~~~WARNING!!!For a comprehensive guide to this data and other UCR data, please see my book at ucrbook.comVersion 10 release notes:Adds 2022 dataVersion 9 release notes:Adds 2021 data.Version 8 release notes:Adds 2019 and 2020 data. Please note that the FBI has retired UCR data ending in 2020 data so this will be the last UCR hate crime data they release. Changes .rda file to .rds.Version 7 release notes:Changes release notes description, does not change data.Version 6 release notes:Adds 2018 dataVersion 5 release notes:Adds data in the following formats: SPSS, SAS, and Excel.Changes project name to avoid confusing this data for the ones done by NACJD.Adds data for 1991.Fixes bug where bias motivation "anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, mixed group (lgbt)" was labeled "anti-homosexual (gay and lesbian)" prior to 2013 causing there to be two columns and zero values for years with the wrong label.All data is now directly from the FBI, not NACJD. The data initially comes as ASCII+SPSS Setup files and read into R using the package asciiSetupReader. All work to clean the data and save it in various file formats was also done in R. Version 4 release notes: Adds data for 2017.Adds rows that submitted a zero-report (i.e. that agency reported no hate crimes in the year). This is for all years 1992-2017. Made changes to categorical variables (e.g. bias motivation columns) to make categories consistent over time. Different years had slightly different names (e.g. 'anti-am indian' and 'anti-american indian') which I made consistent. Made the 'population' column which is the total population in that agency. Version 3 release notes: Adds data for 2016.Order rows by year (descending) and ORI.Version 2 release notes: Fix bug where Philadelphia Police Department had incorrect FIPS county code. The Hate Crime data is an FBI data set that is part of the annual Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program data. This data contains information about hate crimes reported in the United States. Please note that the files are quite large and may take some time to open.Each row indicates a hate crime incident for an agency in a given year. I have made a unique ID column ("unique_id") by combining the year, agency ORI9 (the 9 character Originating Identifier code), and incident number columns together. Each column is a variable related to that incident or to the reporting agency. Some of the important columns are the incident date, what crime occurred (up to 10 crimes), the number of victims for each of these crimes, the bias motivation for each of these crimes, and the location of each crime. It also includes the total number of victims, total number of offenders, and race of offenders (as a group). Finally, it has a number of columns indicating if the victim for each offense was a certain type of victim or not (e.g. individual victim, business victim religious victim, etc.). The only changes I made to the data are the following. Minor changes to column names to make all column names 32 characters or fewer (so it can be saved in a Stata format), made all character values lower case, reordered columns. I also generated incident month, weekday, and month-day variables from the incident date variable included in the original data.

Three crime data sources were collected and merged for this study. All three crime sources were either only reporting on the U.S. state of Kentucky (KOOL and Louisville Open Data), or filtered to only contain results for the U.S. state of Kentucky (FBI). Each data source contains unique features such as crime classifications, and unique challenges in collection and cleaning.

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issues a variety of query-able crime related data on their website. This data is sourced from law enforcement agencies across the U.S. as part of their National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and its standards. The goal of gathering, standardizing, and providing this information is to facilitate research into crime and law enforcement patterns. The information is provided as a collection of CSV files with instructions and code for importing into a SQL database. For the purposes of this research, we utilized the the crime databases for the years 2017, 2018 and 2019, containing a total of 1,939,990 unique incidents. The NIBRS_code property denotes the type of crime as assigned by the reporting agency. The human trafficking codes are 40A (Prostitution), 40B (Assisting or Promoting Prostitution), and 370 (Pornography/Obscene Material). The drug incidents were found using codes 35A (Drug/Narcotic Violations) and 35B (Drug Equipment Violations).

The Kentucky Department of Corrections, as a service to the public, provides an online lookup of people currently in its custody called Kentucky Offender Online Lookup (KOOL). This web application offers users tools to search for sets of inmates based on features such as name, crime date, crime name, race, and gender. The data that KOOL searches contains only people who are currently under supervision of the state of Kentucky (or should be under supervision in the case of escape).

The Louisville Open Data Initiative (LOD) is a program from the city of Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.A. to increase the transparency of the city government and promote technological innovation. As part of LOD, a dataset of crime reports is made available online. The records contained within the LOD dataset represent any call for police service where a police incident report was generated. This does not necessarily mean a crime was committed, as an incident report can be generated before an investigation has taken place.

In 2023, Texas had the highest number of forcible rape cases in the United States, with 15,097 reported rapes. Delaware had the lowest number of reported forcible rape cases at 194. Number vs. rate It is perhaps unsurprising that Texas and California reported the highest number of rapes, as these states have the highest population of states in the U.S. When looking at the rape rate, or the number of rapes per 100,000 of the population, a very different picture is painted: Alaska was the state with the highest rape rate in the country in 2023, with California ranking as 30th in the nation. The prevalence of rape Rape and sexual assault are notorious for being underreported crimes, which means that the prevalence of sex crimes is likely much higher than what is reported. Additionally, more than a third of women worry about being sexually assaulted, and most sexual assaults are perpetrated by someone the victim knew.