FBI to Release 2006 Uniform Crime Report

[Lambo]

Press Release
For Immediate Release
September 21, 2007
Washington D.C.
FBI National Press Office
(202) 324-3691

FBI to Release 2006 Uniform Crime Report (UCR) Statistics on Monday September 24, 2007, at 9 a.m. EST
The FBI will post the online publication Crime in the United States on its website http://www.fbi.gov on Monday, September 24, 2007 at 9 a.m. EST. The web-only publication is an annual report compiled by the FBI. It is a nationwide, cooperative statistical effort of more than 17,000 city, county, and state law enforcement agencies voluntarily reporting data on crimes that were brought to their attention. Monday’s report will contain comprehensive data on the scope and volume of crimes that occurred in the U.S. in 2006.

There will not be any advance/embargoed copies of the report available. The report follows the release of two FBI preliminary reports on 2006 crime statistics. The first, issued on December 18, 2006, focused on the first six months of 2006. The second preliminary report, issued on June 4, 2007, examined the full calendar year of 2006, but contained only data from cities with populations of one million or more.

Since 1930, the FBI has administered the UCR program. The program’s primary objective is to generate reliable information for use in law enforcement administration, operation, and management. Over the years, its data has become one of the country’s leading social indicators. Criminologists, sociologists, legislators, municipal planners, the media, and other students of criminal justice use the statistics for research and planning purposes.​

 

[Harley Quinn]

Well I am going to add a bump to this
I will be looking forward to reading what they have to say

 

[obxned]

Can we trust their numbers?

 

[Librarian]

Can we trust their numbers?

They're the best we've got.

There have been some problems. The data are reported from the individual agencies and aggregated by the FBI; some agencies, some years have been entirely excluded due to data quality "issues".

I don't think FBI or anyone else does a wholesale audit on the external agency data.

One of the defects of the reporting is that only the police-level state is available; legal resolution of some arrests happens later, often in a different year, so we get some crimes reported as murders that are later determined to be lawful self-defense. There was a Time Magazine story about that some years back; can't seem to find it just now, and plowing through Time's online archive isn't all that urgent today.

 

[Harley Quinn]

Bump, any one read the news

 

[30 cal slob]

well, this is interesting.

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_07.html

!

 

[DoubleTapDrew]

Well considering you are almost twice as likely to be killed by hands/fist/feet/etc. than by any rifle (let alone an "assault rifle" as the gun grabbers would call them) I think we need to immediately ban appendages before we can talk about any sort of gun ban. It's for the (soon to be quadrapalegic) children!

 

[Harley Quinn]

I believe that might be the one
If not at least we are in the latest posts and might get more activity

 

[Harley Quinn]

I am going to bump this again, seems like most are not interested.

 

[oobray]

The UCR is good to look at for crime trends but it's only about 1/3 of the story. The UCR is only those crimes that are reported to police. It has been estimated that greater than 60% of crime is not reported. So to supplement the UCR one should look at the National Crime Victimization Survey which gives a better look at those crimes which were not reported.

While neither one of these sources could be considered "concrete" in nature. They do illustrate interesting trends such as weapons used in crimes, relationships between the victim and assailant etc.

 

[baz]

Not only are hands and feet twice as likely to kill as rifles, in 2006 murders committed using handguns declined by 2%, while murders committed by strangulation increased by 14.4 percent. Strangulation is a pretty intensely personal way to kill someone. What can we do to stop it?

I love statistics, man.

 

[Librarian]

NCVS has always looked softer to me.

It has the minor defect that it's a bunch of government employees first meeting the subjects, then doing telephone surveys until the subjects drop out. Some people feel that the people surveyed have a very cautious response to speaking to government employees.

Since it's true that many of the crimes reported to NCVS don't get reported to police, it's hard to verify the accuracy of the reports. In that respect, perhaps it's a good gauge of public trust in the effectiveness of law enforcement: why report something (which would show up in UCR, one hopes) if there seems to be no benefit to do so?

Exactly that criticism has been used (by antis) to deprecate the NCVS data as an indicator of defensive gun uses (DGU) - no police reports, how do we know they happened? The structure of the questions also has been used (by pros) to criticize the same information, as it used to go 'were you a victim of a crime?', then ask about what self-defense measures were taken. The argument on that side runs 'I used my gun to prevent a crime, therefore I was not a victim, therefore my answer to the first has to be "no".' On that sequence, some folks suggest an undercount of DGU.

Side note: I 'collect' UCR. I have the hardcopy of the 1995 version, and computer-readable versions 1995-2006. Fibby can't seem to get it entirely together on how to make the reports available. Last time they did it right, IMO, was 2004, when they had the full document in one .PDF file. Sometimes they have a series of smaller .PDF files linked through the intro, and that's ok. The 2006 version is apparently all HTML, and while there are tools to work with that (I use Firefox and DownThemAll), one loses a lot of the formatting and graphs; the downloadable files they offer this time are not a very good solution to that problem. I don't mind downloading tables as Excel spreadsheets as a special task.

So I'm a regular correspondent to that tiny part of the FBI

 

[isp2605]

Can we trust their numbers?

It's not "their" (FBI) numbers. The FBI only compiles the stats that are reported to them. Each agency is responsible for reporting their own stats. For IL as an example, that's a bit over 1100 agencies.
As oobray explained the numbers in the UCR are only reported crimes. For obvious reasons crimes like murder and arson are going to be more accurate than crimes like burglary or assaults. If the public doesn't report the crime then there's no way for any LEA to know if a crime has been committed.

 

[hso]

Interesting report.

Once again we see that states with no carry restrictions and those with minimal carry restrictions do not have higher firearms murder rates than those with may issue or restrictive carry provisions. There is no correlation between law abiding citizens having full unrestricted access to firearms and unrestricted carry and high murder rates. The claims of the gun-prohibitionists are not borne out by the facts.

 

[Double Naught Spy]

Along similar lines and just as interesting is the aspect that since there are more states in 2006 than in 2004 that allowed carry, then the violent crime rate should have fallen as per pro-CCW people who directly correlate crime rates with CCW, but this obviously is not happening. While overall property crime is down, burglaries are up in the last couple of years which seem to be stats contrary to CCW claims (that somehow associate CCW law with defending homes, businesses, etc. against things like burglary because burglars are afraid of confronting folks with CCW permits).

Also interesting is the crime both fell and rose in CCW states and non-CCW states. There does not appear to be any sort of trend correlating more crime in CCW states as noted by hso or less crime either. There isn't any clear trend that CCW has a positive or negative affect on large scale crime stats such as those by state or region.

 

[Jeff White]

Also interesting is the crime both fell and rose in CCW states and non-CCW states. There does not appear to be any sort of trend correlating more crime in CCW states as noted by hso or less crime either. There isn't any clear trend that CCW has a positive or negative affect on large scale crime stats such as those by state or region.

The availability of firearms has almost nothing to do with the crime rate. Firearms are inanimate objects. It's the number of criminals that affects the crime rate most. Cut down the number of males between 14 and 28, increase the number of criminals who are in prison, change the social programs that have created subdivisions in our society where a criminal lifestyle becomes the normal lifestyle for a majority of the people in that area...and you can affect the crime rate. But if you waved a magic wand and removed every gun from society or issued everyone a gun and required him/her to carry it, and you won't affect the crime rate at all.

Jeff

 

[Soybomb]

The availability of firearms has almost nothing to do with the crime rate. Firearms are inanimate objects. It's the number of criminals that affects the crime rate most. Cut down the number of males between 14 and 28, increase the number of criminals who are in prison, change the social programs that have created subdivisions in our society where a criminal lifestyle becomes the normal lifestyle for a majority of the people in that area...and you can affect the crime rate. But if you waved a magic wand and removed every gun from society or issued everyone a gun and required him/her to carry it, and you won't affect the crime rate at all.

If I could have this engraved on a mallet and every time I see someone say "john lott" give them a swift tap with it it would be very useful.

Always a handy report to cite when talking to anti's, the numbers look pretty unremarkable as far as homicide by firearm goes. The leoka report is usually good for when the anti's start to talk about "cop killer this and that" but it looks like the 2006 report isn't out for that yet.

 

[Double Naught Spy]

Mallets, right, but for whatever reason, many gun owners want to believe that CCW permits somehow change crime rates because of the supposed fear instilled in bad guys that potential victims might be armed.

If guns were magic wands, then we would not see "may" or "no" issue places like California, Mass., Rhode Island (huge drop), New Jersey, and New York having drops in violent crime while "shall" issue places like Michigan, Mississippi, Vermont (huge rise), Penn., Kansas (huge), and Georgia have rises.

The posts have been made on this forum and other such forums time after time that CCW laws lower crime or lower violent crime. So when hso pointed out the argument of antis being invalid, it was important to equally stress that the pro argument is just as invalid and as Jeff noted, it is invalid for the same reason. It is naive to try to try to promote the benefits of a cause you support when it is based on flawed assumptions.

CCW isn't going to change crime rates on a state, regional, or national level. What it does do is to give individuals the opportunity to defend themselves in a manner that they otherwise would not have. THAT is the level at which change is effected and it is the critical level.

 

[ozwyn]

I think a comparison between crime and unemployment rates by region/year would yield better results.

That being said, as a rule the FBI numbers tend to support gun rights arugments and not gun control arguments.