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.

In 2023, the District of Columbia had the highest reported violent crime rate in the United States, with 1,150.9 violent crimes per 100,000 of the population. Maine had the lowest reported violent crime rate, with 102.5 offenses per 100,000 of the population. Life in the District The District of Columbia has seen a fluctuating population over the past few decades. Its population decreased throughout the 1990s, when its crime rate was at its peak, but has been steadily recovering since then. While unemployment in the District has also been falling, it still has had a high poverty rate in recent years. The gentrification of certain areas within Washington, D.C. over the past few years has made the contrast between rich and poor even greater and is also pushing crime out into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs around the District. Law enforcement in the U.S. Crime in the U.S. is trending downwards compared to years past, despite Americans feeling that crime is a problem in their country. In addition, the number of full-time law enforcement officers in the U.S. has increased recently, who, in keeping with the lower rate of crime, have also made fewer arrests than in years past.

In response to a growing concern about hate crimes, the United States Congress enacted the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990. The Act requires the attorney general to establish guidelines and collect, as part of the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, data "about crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, including where appropriate the crimes of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, simple assault, intimidation, arson, and destruction, damage or vandalism of property." Hate crime data collection was required by the Act to begin in calendar year 1990 and to continue for four successive years. In September 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act amended the Hate Crime Statistics Act to add disabilities, both physical and mental, as factors that could be considered a basis for hate crimes. Although the Act originally mandated data collection for five years, the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996 amended the collection duration "for each calendar year," making hate crime statistics a permanent addition to the UCR program. As with the other UCR data, law enforcement agencies contribute reports either directly or through their state reporting programs. Information contained in the data includes number of victims and offenders involved in each hate crime incident, type of victims, bias motivation, offense type, and location type.

In 2023, an estimated 1,21,467 violent crimes occurred in the United States. This is a decrease from the year before, when 1,256,671 violent crimes were reported. Violent crime in the United States The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that violent crime fell nationwide in the period from 1990 to 2023. Violent crime was at a height of 1.93 million crimes in 1992, but has since reached a low of 1.15 million violent crimes in 2014. When conducting crime reporting, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program considered murder, nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault to be violent crimes, because they are offenses which involve force or threat of violence. In 2023, there were 19,252 reported murder and nonnegligent manslaughter cases in the United States. California ranked first on a list of U.S. states by number of murders, followed by Texas, and Florida.The greatest number of murders were committed by murderers of unknown relationship to their victim. “Girlfriend” was the fourth most common relationship of victim to offender in 2023, with a reported 568 partners murdering their girlfriends that year, while the sixth most common was “wife.” In addition, seven people were murdered by their employees and 12 people were murdered by their employers. The most used murder weapon in 2023 was the handgun, which was used in 7,1 murders that year. According to the FBI, firearms (of all types) were used in more than half of the nation’s murders. The total number of firearms manufactured in the U.S. annually has reached over 13 million units.

This project was designed to isolate the effects that individual crimes have on wage rates and housing prices, as gauged by individuals' and households' decisionmaking preferences changing over time. Additionally, this project sought to compute a dollar value that individuals would bear in their wages and housing costs to reduce the rates of specific crimes. The study used multiple decades of information obtained from counties across the United States to create a panel dataset. This approach was designed to compensate for the problem of collinearity by tracking how housing and occupation choices within particular locations changed over the decade considering all amenities or disamenities, including specific crime rates. Census data were obtained for this project from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) constructed by Ruggles and Sobek (1997). Crime data were obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). Other data were collected from the American Chamber of Commerce Researchers Association, County and City Data Book, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Environmental Protection Agency. Independent variables for the Wages Data (Part 1) include years of education, school enrollment, sex, ability to speak English well, race, veteran status, employment status, and occupation and industry. Independent variables for the Housing Data (Part 2) include number of bedrooms, number of other rooms, building age, whether unit was a condominium or detached single-family house, acreage, and whether the unit had a kitchen, plumbing, public sewers, and water service. Both files include the following variables as separating factors: census geographic division, cost-of-living index, percentage unemployed, percentage vacant housing, labor force employed in manufacturing, living near a coastline, living or working in the central city, per capita local taxes, per capita intergovernmental revenue, per capita property taxes, population density, and commute time to work. Lastly, the following variables measured amenities or disamenities: average precipitation, temperature, windspeed, sunshine, humidity, teacher-pupil ratio, number of Superfund sites, total suspended particulate in air, and rates of murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, auto theft, violent crimes, and property crimes.

This dataset contains county-level totals for the years 2002-2014 for eight types of crime: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson. These crimes are classed as Part I criminal offenses by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in their Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. Each record in the dataset represents the total of each type of criminal offense reported in (or, in the case of missing data, attributed to) the county in a given year.

In recent years, gun violence in the United States has become an alarmingly common occurrence. From 2016, there has been over ****** homicides by firearm in the U.S. each year and firearms have been found to make up the majority of murder weapons in the country by far, demonstrating increasing rates of gun violence occurring throughout the nation. As of 2025, Mississippi was the state with the highest gun violence rate per 100,000 residents in the United States, at **** percent, followed by Louisiana, at **** percent. In comparison, Massachusetts had a gun violence rate of *** percent, the lowest out of all the states. The importance of gun laws Gun laws in the United States vary from state to state, which has been found to affect the differing rates of gun violence throughout the country. Fewer people die by gun violence in states where gun safety laws have been passed, while gun violence rates remain high in states where gun usage is easily permitted and even encouraged. In addition, some states suffer from high rates of gun violence despite having strong gun safety laws due to gun trafficking, as traffickers can distribute firearms illegally past state lines. The right to bear arms Despite evidence from other countries demonstrating that strict gun control measures reduce rates of gun violence, the United States has remained reluctant to enact gun control laws. This can largely be attributed to the Second Amendment of the Constitution, which states that citizens have the right to bear arms. Consequently, gun control has become a highly partisan issue in the U.S., with ** percent of Democrats believing that it was more important to limit gun ownership while ** percent of Republicans felt that it was more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns.

These data examine the effects on total crime rates of changes in the demographic composition of the population and changes in criminality of specific age and race groups. The collection contains estimates from national data of annual age-by-race specific arrest rates and crime rates for murder, robbery, and burglary over the 21-year period 1965-1985. The data address the following questions: (1) Are the crime rates reported by the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) data series valid indicators of national crime trends? (2) How much of the change between 1965 and 1985 in total crime rates for murder, robbery, and burglary is attributable to changes in the age and race composition of the population, and how much is accounted for by changes in crime rates within age-by-race specific subgroups? (3) What are the effects of age and race on subgroup crime rates for murder, robbery, and burglary? (4) What is the effect of time period on subgroup crime rates for murder, robbery, and burglary? (5) What is the effect of birth cohort, particularly the effect of the very large (baby-boom) cohorts following World War II, on subgroup crime rates for murder, robbery, and burglary? (6) What is the effect of interactions among age, race, time period, and cohort on subgroup crime rates for murder, robbery, and burglary? (7) How do patterns of age-by-race specific crime rates for murder, robbery, and burglary compare for different demographic subgroups? The variables in this study fall into four categories. The first category includes variables that define the race-age cohort of the unit of observation. The values of these variables are directly available from UCR and include year of observation (from 1965-1985), age group, and race. The second category of variables were computed using UCR data pertaining to the first category of variables. These are period, birth cohort of age group in each year, and average cohort size for each single age within each single group. The third category includes variables that describe the annual age-by-race specific arrest rates for the different crime types. These variables were estimated for race, age, group, crime type, and year using data directly available from UCR and population estimates from Census publications. The fourth category includes variables similar to the third group. Data for estimating these variables were derived from available UCR data on the total number of offenses known to the police and total arrests in combination with the age-by-race specific arrest rates for the different crime types.

The research team collected data on homicide, robbery, and assault offending from 1984-2006 for youth 13 to 24 years of age in 91 of the 100 largest cities in the United States (based on the 1980 Census) from various existing data sources. Data on youth homicide perpetration were acquired from the Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) and data on nonlethal youth violence (robbery and assault) were obtained from the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). Annual homicide, robbery, and assault arrest rates per 100,000 age-specific populations (i.e., 13 to 17 and 18 to 24 year olds) were calculated by year for each city in the study. Data on city characteristics were derived from several sources including the County and City Data Books, SHR, and the Vital Statistics Multiple Cause of Death File. The research team constructed a dataset representing lethal and nonlethal offending at the city level for 91 cities over the 23-year period from 1984 to 2006, resulting in 2,093 city year observations.

These data on 19th- and early 20th-century police department and arrest behavior were collected between 1975 and 1978 for a study of police and crime in the United States. Raw and aggregated time-series data are presented in Parts 1 and 3 on 23 American cities for most years during the period 1860-1920. The data were drawn from annual reports of police departments found in the Library of Congress or in newspapers and legislative reports located elsewhere. Variables in Part 1, for which the city is the unit of analysis, include arrests for drunkenness, conditional offenses and homicides, persons dismissed or held, police personnel, and population. Part 3 aggregates the data by year and reports some of these variables on a per capita basis, using a linear interpolation from the last decennial census to estimate population. Part 2 contains data for 267 United States cities for the period 1880-1890 and was generated from the 1880 federal census volume, REPORT ON THE DEFECTIVE, DEPENDENT, AND DELINQUENT CLASSES, published in 1888, and from the 1890 federal census volume, SOCIAL STATISTICS OF CITIES. Information includes police personnel and expenditures, arrests, persons held overnight, trains entering town, and population.

These data provide information on the number of arrests reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program each year by police agencies in the United States. These arrest reports provide data on 43 offenses including violent crime, drug use, gambling, and larceny. The data received by ICPSR were structured as a hierarchical file containing, per reporting police agency: an agency header record, and 1 to 43 detail offense records containing the counts of arrests by age, sex, and race for a particular offense. ICPSR restructured the original data to logical record length format with the agency header record variables copied onto the detail records. Consequently, each record contains arrest counts for a particular agency-offense.

The purpose of this project was to estimate long-term trends in violent victimization by gender and various socio-demographic factors. These factors included race and ethnicity, age, type of place (urban, suburban, rural), socio-economic status, marital status (for adults), and family status (for juveniles). The principal investigators also further disaggregated these violent victimization trends by victim-offender relationship to reveal trends in violence committed by strangers, intimate partners, and known/non-intimate offenders. The researchers produced these various trends in violent victimization by pooling and appropriately weighting the National Crime Survey and its successor, the National Crime Victimization Survey for the period 1973 to 2005, resulting in 33 years of data. In total, a series of 135 trends in violent victimization were developed.

Introduction

Gun Violence Statistics: The following gun violence statistics reveal the harsh reality of firearm-related deaths and injuries across the United States. With over 46,700 gun-related fatalities recorded in 2023, these numbers highlight an ongoing crisis that extends far beyond high-profile mass shootings. From suicides and homicides to accidental shootings and legal interventions, the data gives us a clear picture of how widespread and deadly gun violence has become in the world. By analyzing the latest gun violence statistics, we can better understand which communities are most affected, how trends have shifted over the year, and where prevention efforts are most needed.

In this article, I’ll break down all the major aspects of firearm-related deaths in the U.S., supported by verified data and clear explanations. The goal is to help my readers understand not just the numbers, but the story behind them. Now let’s have a deeper look.

In 2022, about *********** violent crimes were reported in the United States. Of these, about ************ were simple assault. A further ************ violent crimes were domestic violence.

This dataset contains aggregate data on violent index victimizations at the quarter level of each year (i.e., January – March, April – June, July – September, October – December), from 2001 to the present (1991 to present for Homicides), with a focus on those related to gun violence. Index crimes are 10 crime types selected by the FBI (codes 1-4) for special focus due to their seriousness and frequency. This dataset includes only those index crimes that involve bodily harm or the threat of bodily harm and are reported to the Chicago Police Department (CPD). Each row is aggregated up to victimization type, age group, sex, race, and whether the victimization was domestic-related. Aggregating at the quarter level provides large enough blocks of incidents to protect anonymity while allowing the end user to observe inter-year and intra-year variation. Any row where there were fewer than three incidents during a given quarter has been deleted to help prevent re-identification of victims. For example, if there were three domestic criminal sexual assaults during January to March 2020, all victims associated with those incidents have been removed from this dataset. Human trafficking victimizations have been aggregated separately due to the extremely small number of victimizations.

This dataset includes a " GUNSHOT_INJURY_I " column to indicate whether the victimization involved a shooting, showing either Yes ("Y"), No ("N"), or Unknown ("UKNOWN.") For homicides, injury descriptions are available dating back to 1991, so the "shooting" column will read either "Y" or "N" to indicate whether the homicide was a fatal shooting or not. For non-fatal shootings, data is only available as of 2010. As a result, for any non-fatal shootings that occurred from 2010 to the present, the shooting column will read as “Y.” Non-fatal shooting victims will not be included in this dataset prior to 2010; they will be included in the authorized dataset, but with "UNKNOWN" in the shooting column.

The dataset is refreshed daily, but excludes the most recent complete day to allow CPD time to gather the best available information. Each time the dataset is refreshed, records can change as CPD learns more about each victimization, especially those victimizations that are most recent. The data on the Mayor's Office Violence Reduction Dashboard is updated daily with an approximately 48-hour lag. As cases are passed from the initial reporting officer to the investigating detectives, some recorded data about incidents and victimizations may change once additional information arises. Regularly updated datasets on the City's public portal may change to reflect new or corrected information.

How does this dataset classify victims?

The methodology by which this dataset classifies victims of violent crime differs by victimization type:

Homicide and non-fatal shooting victims: A victimization is considered a homicide victimization or non-fatal shooting victimization depending on its presence in CPD's homicide victims data table or its shooting victims data table. A victimization is considered a homicide only if it is present in CPD's homicide data table, while a victimization is considered a non-fatal shooting only if it is present in CPD's shooting data tables and absent from CPD's homicide data table.

To determine the IUCR code of homicide and non-fatal shooting victimizations, we defer to the incident IUCR code available in CPD's Crimes, 2001-present dataset (available on the City's open data portal). If the IUCR code in CPD's Crimes dataset is inconsistent with the homicide/non-fatal shooting categorization, we defer to CPD's Victims dataset.

For a criminal homicide, the only sensible IUCR codes are 0110 (first-degree murder) or 0130 (second-degree murder). For a non-fatal shooting, a sensible IUCR code must signify a criminal sexual assault, a robbery, or, most commonly, an aggravated battery. In rare instances, the IUCR code in CPD's Crimes and Victims dataset do not align with the homicide/non-fatal shooting categorization:

1. In instances where a homicide victimization does not correspond to an IUCR code 0110 or 0130, we set the IUCR code to "01XX" to indicate that the victimization was a homicide but we do not know whether it was a first-degree murder (IUCR code = 0110) or a second-degree murder (IUCR code = 0130).
2. When a non-fatal shooting victimization does not correspond to an IUCR code that signifies a criminal sexual assault, robbery, or aggravated battery, we enter “UNK” in the IUCR column, “YES” in the GUNSHOT_I column, and “NON-FATAL” in the PRIMARY column to indicate that the victim was non-fatally shot, but the precise IUCR code is unknown.

Other violent crime victims: For other violent crime types, we refer to the IUCR classification that exists in CPD's victim table, with only one exception:

1. When there is an incident that is associated with no victim with a matching IUCR code, we assume that this is an error. Every crime should have at least 1 victim with a matching IUCR code. In these cases, we change the IUCR code to reflect the incident IUCR code because CPD's incident table is considered to be more reliable than the victim table.

Note: All businesses identified as victims in CPD data have been removed from this dataset.

Note: The definition of “homicide” (shooting or otherwise) does not include justifiable homicide or involuntary manslaughter. This dataset also excludes any cases that CPD considers to be “unfounded” or “noncriminal.”

Note: In some instances, the police department's raw incident-level data and victim-level data that were inputs into this dataset do not align on the type of crime that occurred. In those instances, this dataset attempts to correct mismatches between incident and victim specific crime types. When it is not possible to determine which victims are associated with the most recent crime determination, the dataset will show empty cells in the respective demographic fields (age, sex, race, etc.).

Note: The initial reporting officer usually asks victims to report demographic data. If victims are unable to recall, the reporting officer will use their best judgment. “Unknown” can be reported if it is truly unknown.

Important Note: This item is in mature support as of June 2023 and will be retired in December 2025.This map shows the total crime index in the U.S. in 2022 in a multi-scale map (by state, county, ZIP Code, tract, and block group). The layer uses 2020 Census boundaries.The pop-up is configured to include the following information for each geography level:Total crime indexPersonal and Property crime indices Sub-categories of personal and property crime indicesPermitted use of this data is covered in the DATA section of the EsriMaster Agreement (E204CW) and these supplemental terms.

The National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) provides states and communities with a clearer understanding of violent deaths to guide local decisions about efforts to prevent violence and helps them track progress over time. To stop violent deaths, we must first understand all the facts. Created in 2002, the NVDRS is a surveillance system that pulls together data on violent deaths in 18 states (see map below), including information about homicides, such as homicides perpetrated by a intimate partner (e.g., boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband), child maltreatment (or child abuse) fatalities, suicides, deaths where individuals are killed by law enforcement in the line of duty, unintentional firearm injury deaths, and deaths of undetermined intent. These data are supported by WISQARS, an interactive query system that provides data on injury deaths, violent deaths, and nonfatal injuries.

This study provides an evidence-based understanding on etiological issues related to school shootings and rampage shootings. It created a national, open-source database that includes all publicly known shootings that resulted in at least one injury that occurred on K-12 school grounds between 1990 and 2016. The investigators sought to better understand the nature of the problem and clarify the types of shooting incidents occurring in schools, provide information on the characteristics of school shooters, and compare fatal shooting incidents to events where only injuries resulted to identify intervention points that could be exploited to reduce the harm caused by shootings. To accomplish these objectives, the investigators used quantitative multivariate and qualitative case studies research methods to document where and when school violence occurs, and highlight key incident and perpetrator level characteristics to help law enforcement and school administrators differentiate between the kinds of school shootings that exist, to further policy responses that are appropriate for individuals and communities.

The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) Series, previously called the National Crime Surveys (NCS), has been collecting data on personal and household victimization through an ongoing survey of a nationally-representative sample of residential addresses since 1973. The NCVS was designed with four primary objectives: (1) to develop detailed information about the victims and consequences of crime, (2) to estimate the number and types of crimes not reported to the police, (3) to provide uniform measures of selected types of crimes, and (4) to permit comparisons over time and types of areas. The survey categorizes crimes as "personal" or "property." Personal crimes include rape and sexual attack, robbery, aggravated and simple assault, and purse-snatching/pocket-picking, while property crimes include burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft, and vandalism. Each respondent is asked a series of screen questions designed to determine whether she or he was victimized during the six-month period preceding the first day of the month of the interview. A "household respondent" is also asked to report on crimes against the household as a whole (e.g., burglary, motor vehicle theft). The data include type of crime, month, time, and location of the crime, relationship between victim and offender, characteristics of the offender, self-protective actions taken by the victim during the incident and results of those actions, consequences of the victimization, type of property lost, whether the crime was reported to police and reasons for reporting or not reporting, and offender use of weapons, drugs, and alcohol. Basic demographic information such as age, race, gender, and income is also collected, to enable analysis of crime by various subpopulations. This version of the NCVS, referred to as the collection year, contains records from interviews conducted in the 12 months of the given year. This dataset represents the revised version of the NCVS on a collection year basis for 2016. A collection year contains records from interviews conducted in the 12 months of the given year. Under the collection year format, victimizations are counted in the year the interview is conducted, regardless of the year when the crime incident occurred. The 2016 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) violent and property crime estimates were significantly higher than 2015, but it was not possible to determine the degree to which the change in rates resulted from the sample redesign rather than real changes in U.S. victimization levels. Therefore, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) examined the 2015 and 2016 victimization rates separately for new and continuing sample counties in the 2016 Criminal Victimization bulletin. The BJS requested that the Census Bureau create a 2016 revised file with outgoing county interviews from July-December 2015, continuing county interviews from January-June 2016, and all interviews (continuing and new counties) from July-December 2016. In other words, the outgoing 2015 cases replaced the new 2016 cases in the first half of 2016. The files in this study serve as a separate research file to allow data users to make comparisons between 2015, 2016, and 2017 NCVS estimates using a nationally representative sample. It provides a sample that still represents the entire country but does not have the inflated crime rates seen in the new counties in 2016.

Crime data information for the United States and all states from the Uniform Crime Reporting Program.