Most people are familiar with the broad statements in headlines about crime trends in the United States based on the Federal Bureau of Investigationās Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. However, UCR should be seen as more than simply a measure of broad changes in crime at the national level. The information used by the federal UCR Program flows upwards from a call for service or incident report with a law enforcement agency to the UCR State Program before reaching the federal level. The basic building block of the whole program is a report of a crime or an arrest, and from that basic information a multitude of stories can be told.
To truly understand the proper use of UCR data, one must understand the purpose for which it was collected. The ultimate goal was to provide data and information to help law enforcement do its job. The problem with that rather succinct statement of purpose is that, throughout the nearly 85 years that UCR has been around, the ālaw enforcement jobā has never been static. Policing has evolved from the 1920s to the present day, and within those changes, the relationship between policing and crime data has also evolved. Understanding the changing context of policing is key for understanding the overall design of UCR from its beginnings to present day. It allows us to check our modern expectations for law enforcement against a system built upon a different set of premises than those that are currently used.
As one of only two national measures of crime in the United States, UCR has a prominent place in our understanding of social phenomena. The second measure, the Bureau of Justice Statisticsā National Crime Victimization Survey, benefits from more traditional and purposive research-design techniques. As such, the NCVS has a fairly straightforward interpretation as it relates to the data-collection process. The design of the NCVS allows for statistically defensible estimates of nonfatal (and property) victimizations for both the nation and four regions of the country based on information taken directly from household members over the age of 12 ā regardless of whether or not it was reported to law enforcement. The design also allows the measurement of change in victimization levels over time (Lauritsen & Rezey, 2013). However, there are limitations with the NCVS that would preclude using it to replace UCR. As a household survey, there are no measures of commercial crime, and the restriction to only interviewing household members who are over the age of 12 means that very little can be said about crimes against children.
The UCR Program, on the other hand, has a rather circuitous collection process that mimics both the federalized political structure of city to state to nation and its resulting different levels of scale. This process is so deeply immersed in the day-to-day administration of law enforcement that it can sometimes confound the completeness and comparability of the data. Where the NCVS may be weak, UCR can provide strength. The UCR data are inclusive of all victims, regardless of age. They include commercial crime, and will allow for a greater specificity of location ā down to the jurisdiction ā than the NCVS. The UCR and the NCVS provide for complementary views of the complete picture of crime in the United States. Given that data collected as a part of the UCR Program are not a product of designed collection, the interpretation can become more problematic.
This chapter is intended to accomplish two things. First, it presents a basic understanding of the major data-collection components of the UCR Program that allows one to understand what information is available for analysis. Second, this chapter draws connections between the state of policing and law enforcement at various junctures in the history of the UCR Program. In many ways, this chapter reads like a history of the UCR Program. That is unavoidable considering how long this collection has been in existence. In the end, the reader should see how the role of analysis has shaped the development of the UCR Program. ā[W]e are compelled to recognize that crime statistics must originate with the police and that without police support there can be no crime statisticsā (Uniform crime reporting: A complete manual for police, 1929, p. vii).
The Uniform Crime Reporting system (UCR) was conceived by police chiefs and other leaders in law enforcement in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Created in a time of increasing professionalization on the part of law enforcement, there was a desire to create an accountability method allowing for comparisons regardless of the differences of law that exist between local areas. The time period 1900 to 1929 was the first era of police reform ā an ongoing theme in the history of law enforcement. Early reformers, including Leonhard Fuld, Raymond Fosdick, Bruce Smith, Richard Sylvester, J. Edgar Hoover, and August Vollmer advocated for more education, greater professionalism, and reduced corruption in law enforcement (Uniform crime reporting: A complete manual for police, 1929; Vila & Morris, 1999). Without comprehensive crime data, police chiefs believed that they were unable to defend their work against frequent accusations of inefficiency and incompetence. In addition, there were no means for police executives to evaluate effectively the performance of patrol officers and detectives under their management. It was within this context that the first discussions of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program took place (Uniform crime reporting: A complete manual for police, 1929).
As mentioned earlier, the primary characteristic that differentiates the UCR Program from other data collections about crime is that it is based upon official reports that come to the attention of law enforcement and are voluntarily forwarded to the UCR Program. As such, the data are generated as a result of an administrative process rather than an interview or survey, like the National Crime Victimization Survey. Official criminal justice information progresses from the call for service with law enforcement to the federal UCR Program with aggregation imposed upon the data at each step of the way. The basic building block of the whole UCR Program is an initial report of a crime or an arrest in a local jurisdiction. The flow of information in the UCR Program mirrors the hierarchical structure within politics and law enforcement in the United States.
The creation of the program itself in 1929 was predicated on the idea that it was necessary to provide a common definition for the reporting of crime in order to maintain comparable data both from year to year and agency to agency. While there was a significant amount of discussion about the possibility of creating consistency with the criminal code among all states, the reality of achieving that result was viewed unlikely. In the absence of a unified system, the International Chiefs of Police (IACP) proposed a system based upon a series of standardized definitions with forms to be recorded by local police and sheriffs (Walker & Boehm, n. d.). This process of standardization results in a loss of granularity at each stage. However, what could be lost in nuance was viewed as a gain in the ability to identify patterns across larger spatial areas or time periods. It is analogous to the idea of maps and scale. The types of maps that would be used to navigate through the streets of a particular city would not serve to measure distances across the United States. In the same manner, different questions about crime and criminality require different data with differing levels of detail.
The most detailed information is held by local law enforcement agencies in their records management systems. From those local records management systems, information is forwarded to the State UCR Programs. State Programs are entities charged with the responsibility to manage the collection of UCR data within a particular state. There is no one particular state agency whose responsibility is to manage the UCR Program. State Programs can be associated with the state police, a statistical analysis center, or some other branch of the state government. At the inception of State Programs in the 1960s, the thought was that state agencies would be able to coordinate and communicate more effectively with their local agencies because of proximity and having fewer agencies to manage (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1960ā2004). The information available at each point along this continuum reflects the types of questions being asked at that level of geography or the style of policing being used at that time. This information is often consolidated both conceptually and geographically before moving up the hierarchy (Barnett-Ryan, 2007).
