THIS DATASET WAS LAST UPDATED AT 2:11 PM EASTERN ON SEPT. 3

OVERVIEW

2019 had the most mass killings since at least the 1970s, according to the Associated Press/USA TODAY/Northeastern University Mass Killings Database.

In all, there were 45 mass killings, defined as when four or more people are killed excluding the perpetrator. Of those, 33 were mass shootings . This summer was especially violent, with three high-profile public mass shootings occurring in the span of just four weeks, leaving 38 killed and 66 injured.

A total of 229 people died in mass killings in 2019.

The AP's analysis found that more than 50% of the incidents were family annihilations, which is similar to prior years. Although they are far less common, the 9 public mass shootings during the year were the most deadly type of mass murder, resulting in 73 people's deaths, not including the assailants.

One-third of the offenders died at the scene of the killing or soon after, half from suicides.

About this Dataset

The Associated Press/USA TODAY/Northeastern University Mass Killings database tracks all U.S. homicides since 2006 involving four or more people killed (not including the offender) over a short period of time (24 hours) regardless of weapon, location, victim-offender relationship or motive. The database includes information on these and other characteristics concerning the incidents, offenders, and victims.

The AP/USA TODAY/Northeastern database represents the most complete tracking of mass murders by the above definition currently available. Other efforts, such as the Gun Violence Archive or Everytown for Gun Safety may include events that do not meet our criteria, but a review of these sites and others indicates that this database contains every event that matches the definition, including some not tracked by other organizations.

This data will be updated periodically and can be used as an ongoing resource to help cover these events.

Using this Dataset

To get basic counts of incidents of mass killings and mass shootings by year nationwide, use these queries:

Mass killings by year

Mass shootings by year

To get these counts just for your state:

Filter killings by state

Definition of "mass murder"

Mass murder is defined as the intentional killing of four or more victims by any means within a 24-hour period, excluding the deaths of unborn children and the offender(s). The standard of four or more dead was initially set by the FBI.

This definition does not exclude cases based on method (e.g., shootings only), type or motivation (e.g., public only), victim-offender relationship (e.g., strangers only), or number of locations (e.g., one). The time frame of 24 hours was chosen to eliminate conflation with spree killers, who kill multiple victims in quick succession in different locations or incidents, and to satisfy the traditional requirement of occurring in a “single incident.”

Offenders who commit mass murder during a spree (before or after committing additional homicides) are included in the database, and all victims within seven days of the mass murder are included in the victim count. Negligent homicides related to driving under the influence or accidental fires are excluded due to the lack of offender intent. Only incidents occurring within the 50 states and Washington D.C. are considered.

Methodology

Project researchers first identified potential incidents using the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR). Homicide incidents in the SHR were flagged as potential mass murder cases if four or more victims were reported on the same record, and the type of death was murder or non-negligent manslaughter.

Cases were subsequently verified utilizing media accounts, court documents, academic journal articles, books, and local law enforcement records obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Each data point was corroborated by multiple sources, which were compiled into a single document to assess the quality of information.

In case(s) of contradiction among sources, official law enforcement or court records were used, when available, followed by the most recent media or academic source.

Case information was subsequently compared with every other known mass murder database to ensure reliability and validity. Incidents listed in the SHR that could not be independently verified were excluded from the database.

Project researchers also conducted extensive searches for incidents not reported in the SHR during the time period, utilizing internet search engines, Lexis-Nexis, and Newspapers.com. Search terms include: [number] dead, [number] killed, [number] slain, [number] murdered, [number] homicide, mass murder, mass shooting, massacre, rampage, family killing, familicide, and arson murder. Offender, victim, and location names were also directly searched when available.

This project started at USA TODAY in 2012.

Contacts

Contact AP Data Editor Justin Myers with questions, suggestions or comments about this dataset at jmyers@ap.org. The Northeastern University researcher working with AP and USA TODAY is Professor James Alan Fox, who can be reached at j.fox@northeastern.edu or 617-416-4400.

Number and percentage of homicide victims, by type of firearm used to commit the homicide (total firearms; handgun; rifle or shotgun; fully automatic firearm; sawed-off rifle or shotgun; firearm-like weapons; other firearms, type unknown), Canada, 1974 to 2018.

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 2024.

Real-world Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos

Surveillance videos are able to capture a variety of realistic anomalies. In this paper, we propose to learn anomalies by exploiting both normal and anomalous videos. To avoid annotating the anomalous segments or clips in training videos, which is very time consuming, we propose to learn anomaly through the deep multiple instance ranking framework by leveraging weakly labeled training videos, i.e. the training labels (anomalous or normal) are at video-level instead of clip-level. In our approach, we consider normal and anomalous videos as bags and video segments as instances in multiple instance learning (MIL), and automatically learn a deep anomaly ranking model that predicts high anomaly scores for anomalous video segments. Furthermore, we introduce sparsity and temporal smoothness constraints in the ranking loss function to better localize anomaly during training. We also introduce a new large-scale first of its kind dataset of 128 hours of videos. It consists of 1900 long and untrimmed real-world surveillance videos, with 13 realistic anomalies such as fighting, road accident, burglary, robbery, etc. as well as normal activities. This dataset can be used for two tasks. First, general anomaly detection considering all anomalies in one group and all normal activities in another group. Second, for recognizing each of 13 anomalous activities. Our experimental results show that our MIL method for anomaly detection achieves significant improvement on anomaly detection performance as compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. We provide the results of several recent deep learning baselines on anomalous activity recognition. The low recognition performance of these baselines reveals that our dataset is very challenging and opens more opportunities for future work.

Problem & Motivation

One critical task in video surveillance is detecting anomalous events such as traffic accidents, crimes or illegal activities. Generally, anomalous events rarely occur as compared to normal activities. Therefore, to alleviate the waste of labor and time, developing intelligent computer vision algorithms for automatic video anomaly detection is a pressing need. The goal of a practical anomaly detection system is to timely signal an activity that deviates normal patterns and identify the time window of the occurring anomaly. Therefore, anomaly detection can be considered as coarse level video understanding, which filters out anomalies from normal patterns. Once an anomaly is detected, it can further be categorized into one of the specific activities using classification techniques. In this work, we propose an anomaly detection algorithm using weakly labeled training videos. That is we only know the video-level labels, i.e. a video is normal or contains anomaly somewhere, but we do not know where. This is intriguing because we can easily annotate a large number of videos by only assigning video-level labels. To formulate a weakly-supervised learning approach, we resort to multiple instance learning. Specifically, we propose to learn anomaly through a deep MIL framework by treating normal and anomalous surveillance videos as bags and short segments/clips of each video as instances in a bag. Based on training videos, we automatically learn an anomaly ranking model that predicts high anomaly scores for anomalous segments in a video. During testing, a longuntrimmed video is divided into segments and fed into our deep network which assigns anomaly score for each video segment such that an anomaly can be detected.

Method

Our proposed approach (summarized in Figure 1) begins with dividing surveillance videos into a fixed number of segments during training. These segments make instances in a bag. Using both positive (anomalous) and negative (normal) bags, we train the anomaly detection model using the proposed deep MIL ranking loss. https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/projects/real-world/method.png

UCF-Crime Dataset

We construct a new large-scale dataset, called UCF-Crime, to evaluate our method. It consists of long untrimmed surveillance videos which cover 13 realworld anomalies, including Abuse, Arrest, Arson, Assault, Road Accident, Burglary, Explosion, Fighting, Robbery, Shooting, Stealing, Shoplifting, and Vandalism. These anomalies are selected because they have a significant impact on public safety. We compare our dataset with previous anomaly detection datasets in Table 1. For more details about the UCF-Crime dataset, please refer to our paper. A short description of each anomalous event is given below. Abuse: This event contains videos which show bad, cruel or violent behavior against children, old people, animals, and women. Burglary: This event contains videos that show people (thieves) entering into a building or house with the intention to commit theft. It does not include use of force against people. Robbery: This event contains videos showing thieves taking money unlawfully by force or threat of force. These videos do not include shootings. Stealing: This event contains videos showing people taking property or money without permission. They do not include shoplifting. Shooting: This event contains videos showing act of shooting someone with a gun. Shoplifting: This event contains videos showing people stealing goods from a shop while posing as a shopper. Assault: This event contains videos showing a sudden or violent physical attack on someone. Note that in these videos the person who is assaulted does not fight back. Fighting: This event contains videos displaying two are more people attacking one another. Arson: This event contains videos showing people deliberately setting fire to property. Explosion: This event contains videos showing destructive event of something blowing apart. This event does not include videos where a person intentionally sets a fire or sets off an explosion. Arrest: This event contains videos showing police arresting individuals. Road Accident: This event contains videos showing traffic accidents involving vehicles, pedestrians or cyclists. Vandalism: This event contains videos showing action involving deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private property. The term includes property damage, such as graffiti and defacement directed towards any property without permission of the owner. Normal Event: This event contains videos where no crime occurred. These videos include both indoor (such as a shopping mall) and outdoor scenes as well as day and night-time scenes. https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/projects/real-world/dataset_table.png https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/projects/real-world/method.png

Number, percentage and rate (per 100,000 population) of homicide victims, by racialized identity group (total, by racialized identity group; racialized identity group; South Asian; Chinese; Black; Filipino; Arab; Latin American; Southeast Asian; West Asian; Korean; Japanese; other racialized identity group; multiple racialized identity; racialized identity, but racialized identity group is unknown; rest of the population; unknown racialized identity group), gender (all genders; male; female; gender unknown) and region (Canada; Atlantic region; Quebec; Ontario; Prairies region; British Columbia; territories), 2019 to 2024.

Korea Intentional Homicides: Female: per 100,000 Female data was reported at 0.763 Ratio in 2016. This records an increase from the previous number of 0.756 Ratio for 2015. Korea Intentional Homicides: Female: per 100,000 Female data is updated yearly, averaging 0.761 Ratio from Dec 2011 (Median) to 2016, with 5 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 0.902 Ratio in 2011 and a record low of 0.719 Ratio in 2013. Korea Intentional Homicides: Female: per 100,000 Female data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Korea – Table KR.World Bank: Health Statistics. Intentional homicides, female are estimates of unlawful female homicides purposely inflicted as a result of domestic disputes, interpersonal violence, violent conflicts over land resources, intergang violence over turf or control, and predatory violence and killing by armed groups. Intentional homicide does not include all intentional killing; the difference is usually in the organization of the killing. Individuals or small groups usually commit homicide, whereas killing in armed conflict is usually committed by fairly cohesive groups of up to several hundred members and is thus usually excluded.; ; UN Office on Drugs and Crime's International Homicide Statistics database.; ;

In 2022, over ** out of every 100 thousand women in India were victims of a crime. In comparison to the last year's figures, a rise in the crime rate was observed. Several psychological and patriarchal factors can result in an escalation of crime against women.

In 2024, there were 301,623 cases filed by the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) where the race of the reported missing person was white. In the same year, 17,097 people whose race was unknown were also reported missing in the United States. What is the NCIC? The National Crime Information Center (NCIC) is a digital database that stores crime data for the United States, so criminal justice agencies can access it. As a part of the FBI, it helps criminal justice professionals find criminals, missing people, stolen property, and terrorists. The NCIC database is broken down into 21 files. Seven files belong to stolen property and items, and 14 belong to persons, including the National Sex Offender Register, Missing Person, and Identify Theft. It works alongside federal, tribal, state, and local agencies. The NCIC’s goal is to maintain a centralized information system between local branches and offices, so information is easily accessible nationwide. Missing people in the United States A person is considered missing when they have disappeared and their location is unknown. A person who is considered missing might have left voluntarily, but that is not always the case. The number of the NCIC unidentified person files in the United States has fluctuated since 1990, and in 2022, there were slightly more NCIC missing person files for males as compared to females. Fortunately, the number of NCIC missing person files has been mostly decreasing since 1998.

Number of victims of spousal homicide, Canada and regions, 1997 to 2024.