The measurement and prevalence of violent crime in the United States: persons, places, and times

Abstract

ABSTRACT Divided into four major sections, this paper examines violent criminal victimization in the United States, including its measurement, rates, and trends. The focus is on aggregate assessments of the pervasiveness of violent crime and the tracking of crime trends. Also discussed are various strategies for enhancing and expanding those assessments. Section I presents an overview of criminal victimization and crime trends. Section II describes the measurement of violent crime, focusing mostly on the two largest and longest-standing national repositories of data on reported and unreported crime and victimization: the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Section III presents victimization rates of violent crime using data from the UCR and the NCVS on the most serious violent crimes (i.e., homicide, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) and discusses studies of trends in violent victimization over the past four decades by gender and race. Section IV recommends improvements in the measurement of victimization trends and correlates, suggesting directions for future victimization research in order to capture more precisely the nature, extent, and consequences of violent victimization.