CHAPTER OUTLINE Victimization Across the Nation: The Big Picture

Making Sense of Statistics The Two Official Sources of Data

Facts and Figures in the Federal Bureau of Investiga- tion’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR)

Facts and Figures in the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)

Comparing the UCR and the NCVS A First Glance at the Big Picture: Estimates of the Number of New Crime Victims Each Year

A Second Look at the Big Picture: Watching the FBI’s Crime Clock

Delving Deeper into the Big Picture: Examining Vic- timization Rates

Tapping into the UCR and the NCVS to Fill in the Details of the Big Picture

Searching for Changes in the Big Picture: Detecting Trends in Interpersonal Violence and Theft

Taking a Longer View: Murders in the United States over the Past Century

The Rise and Fall of Murder Rates Since 1900

Putting Crime into Perspective: The Chances of Dying Violently—or from Other Causes

Summary

Key Terms Defined in the Glossary

Questions for Discussion and Debate

Critical Thinking Questions

Suggested Research Projects

LEARNING OBJECTIVES To appreciate how statistics can be used to answer

important questions.

To become aware of the ways statistics can be used to persuade and mislead.

To find out what information about crime victims is collected routinely by the federal government’s Department of Justice.

To become familiar with the ways that victimologists use this data to estimate how many people were harmed by criminalactivitiesandwhatinjuriesandlossestheysuffered.

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VICTIMIZATION ACROSS THE NATION: THE BIG PICTURE

Victimologists gather and interpret data to answer crucial questions such as: How many people are harmed by criminals each year? Is victimization becoming more of a problem or is it subsiding as time goes by? And which groups are targeted the most and the least often? Researchers want to find out where and when the majority of incidents occur, whether predators on the prowl intimidate and subjugate their prey with their bare hands or use weapons, and if so, what kinds? It is also impor- tant to determine whether individuals are attacked by complete strangers or people they know, and how these intended targets act when confronted by assailants. What proportion try to escape or fight back, how many are injured, what percentage

need to be hospitalized, and how much money do they typically lose in an incident?

The answers to specific questions like these yield statistical portraits of crime victims, the pat- terns that persist over the years, and the trends that unfold as time passes; when taken together, they constitute what can be termed the big picture —an overview of what is really happening across the entire United States during the twenty-first century. The big picture serves as an antidote to impressions based on direct but limited personal experiences, as well as self-serving reports circulated by organizations with vested interests, misleading media images, crude stereotypes, and widely held myths. But putting together the big picture is not easy. Compiling an accurate portrayal requires care- ful planning, formulation of the right questions, proper data collection techniques, and insightful analyses.

The big picture is constructed by making sys- tematic observations and accurate measurements on the local level. Then, these village, city, and county reports must be aggregated so victimologists and criminologists are able to characterize the situation in an entire state, region of the country, and ulti- mately the nation as a whole. (Sociologists would call this process as going from an up-close and per- sonal micro level up to a more institutional and systemwide macro level of analysis.) An alternative path to follow is to assemble a randomly selected nationwide sample and then ask those people to share their experiences about what offenders did to them during the past year. If the sample is rep- resentative and large enough, then the findings from this survey can be generalized to project esti- mates about what is happening in the country as a whole. Once the big picture is assembled, it becomes possible to make comparisons between the situation in the United States and other post- industrial societies around the world. The similari- ties are increasing and cultural differences are diminishing as globalization is fostering a modern way of life, which involves seeking higher educa- tion, commuting over congested highways to work, shopping in malls, watching cable TV pro- gramming, using the Internet, and calling the police

LEARNING OBJECTIVES continued

To explore the kinds of information about victims that can be found in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Uniform Crime Report.

To learn how the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System is extracting more information drawn from police files about victims.

To appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of this source of official statistics.

To discover what data about victims and their plight can be found in the federal government’s alternative source of information, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey.

To recognize the strengths and weaknesses of this alter- native source of government statistics.

To assemble official statistics to spot trends, and especially whether the problem of criminal victimization has been intensifying or diminishing over recent decades.

To develop a feel for historical trends in the level of violence in the United States.

To be able to weigh the threat of crime against other perils by understanding comparative risks.

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on smartphones for help, that has spread to even the most remote regions of the planet.

Until the 1970s, few efforts were made to rou- tinely monitor and systematically measure various indicators of the plight of the nation’s victims. By the 1980s, a great many social scientists and agencies were conducting the research needed to bring the big picture into focus. Also, all sorts of special- interest groups began keeping count and dissemi- nating their own estimates about the suffering of a wide variety of victims, including youngsters wounded at school, college students hurt or killed on campus, children reported missing by their par- ents, and people singled out by assailants who hate their “kind.”

The statistics presented in this chapter come from official sources and shed light on the big picture concerning “street crimes” involving inter- personal violence and theft.

Making Sense of Statistics

Statistics are meaningful numbers that reveal impor- tant information. Statistics are of crucial importance to social scientists, policy analysts, and decision makers because they replace vague adjectives such as “many,” “most,” and “few” with precise numbers.

Both victimologists and criminologists gather their own data to make their own calculations, or they scrutinize official statistics, which are com- piled and published by government agencies. Why do they pore over these numbers? By collecting, computing, and analyzing statistics, researchers can answer intriguing questions. Accurate and credible statistics about crimes and victims are vital because they can shed light on these important matters:

■ Statistics can be calculated to estimate victimization rates, which are realistic assessments of threat levels that criminal activ- ities pose to particular individuals and groups. What are the odds various categories of people face of getting robbed or even murdered dur- ing a certain time period? Counts (such as death tolls) answer the question “How many?” Better yet, rates (number of persons who get robbed out of every 100,000 people in a year)

can provide relative estimates about these disturbing questions.

■ Statistics can expose patterns of criminal activity. Patterns reflect predictable relation- ships or regular occurrences that show up during an analysis of the data year after year. For instance, a search for patterns could answer these questions: Is it true that murders generally occur at a higher rate in urban neighborhoods than in suburban and rural areas? Are robberies committed more often against men than women, or vice versa?

■ Statistical trends can demonstrate how situa- tions have changed over the years. Is the bur- den of victimization intensifying or subsiding as time goes by? Are the dangers of getting killed by robbers increasing or decreasing?

■ Statistics can provide estimates of the costs and losses imposed by illegal behavior. Estimates based on accurate records can be important for commercial purposes. For example, insurance companies can determine what premiums to charge their customers this year based on actuarial calculations of the typical financial expenses suffered by policyholders who were hospitalized last year after being wounded by robbers.

■ Statistics can be used for planning purposes to project a rough or “ballpark figure” of next year’s workload. Law enforcement agencies, service providers, and insurance companies can anticipate the approximate size of their case- loads for the following year if they know how many people were harmed the previous year.

■ Statistics also can be computed to evaluate the effectiveness of criminal justice policies and to assess the impact of prevention strategies. Are battered women likely to lead safer lives after their violent mates are arrested, or will they be in greater danger? Do gun buyback programs actually save lives or is their impact on the local murder rate negligible?

■ Finally, statistical profiles can be assembled to yield an impression of what is usual or typical

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about victims in terms of their characteristics such as sex, age, and race/ethnicity. For example, is the widely held belief accurate that most of the people who die violently are young men from troubled families living in poverty- stricken, big-city neighborhoods? Portraits based on data can also provide a reality check to help ground theories that purport to explain why some groups experience higher rates of predation than others. For example, if it turns out that the frail elderly are robbed far less often than teenagers, then any theory that emphasizes only the physical vulnerability of robbers’ targets will be totally off-base or at best incomplete as an explanation of which groups suffer the most, and why.

However, statistics might not only be used, they can also be abused. Statistics never speak for themselves. Sometimes, statistics can be circulated to mislead or deceive. The same numbers can be interpreted quite differently, depending on what spin commentators give them—what is stressed and what is downplayed. Cynics joke that statistics can be used by a special-interest group just like a lamppost is used by a drunkard—for support rather than for illumination.

Officials, agencies, and organizations with their own particular agendas may selectively release statistics to influence decision makers or shape public opinion. For example, law enforce- ment agencies might circulate alarming figures showing a rise in murders and robberies at budget hearings to support their arguments that they need more money for personnel and equipment to bet- ter protect and serve the community. Or these same agencies might cite data showing a declining number of victimizations in order to take credit for improving public safety. Their argument could be that those in charge are doing their jobs so well, such as hunting down murderers or preventing robberies, that they should be given even more funding next year to further drive down the rate of violent crime. Statistics also might serve as evidence to argue that existing laws and policies are having the intended desirable effects or,

conversely, to persuade people that the old meth- ods are not working and new approaches are necessary.

Interpretations of mathematical findings can be given a spin that may be questionable or debatable—for example, emphasizing that a shelter for battered women is “half empty” rather than “half full,” or stressing how much public safety has improved, as opposed to how much more prog- ress is needed before street crime can be considered under control. As useful and necessary as statistics are, they should always be viewed with a healthy dose of scientific skepticism.

Although some mistakes are honest and unavoidable, it is easy to “lie” with statistics by using impressive and scientific-sounding numbers to manipulate or mislead. Whenever statistics are presented to underscore or clinch some point in an argument, their origin and interpretation must be questioned, and certain methodological issues must be raised. What was the origin of the data, and does this source have a vested interest in shap- ing public opinion? Are different estimates available from other sources? What kinds of biases and inac- curacies could have crept into the collection and analysis of the data? How valid and precise were the measurements? How were key variables operationalized—defined and measured? What was counted and what was excluded, and why?

Victimologists committed to objectivity must point out the shortcomings and limitations of data collection systems run by the government. They try to interpret statistics without injecting any particular spin into their conclusions because (it is hoped) they have no “axe to grind” other than enlightening people about the myths and realities surrounding the crime problem.

THE TWO OFFICIAL SOURCES OF DATA

As early as the 1800s, public officials began keeping records about lawbreaking to gauge the “moral health” of society. Then, as now, high rates of inter- personal violence and theft were taken as signs of social pathology—indications that something was

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profoundly wrong with the way people generally interacted in everyday life. Annual data sets were compiled to determine whether illegal activities were being brought under control as time passed. Monitoring trends is even more important today because many innovative but intrusive and expensive criminal justice policies intended to curb crime have been implemented.

Two government reports published each year contain statistical data that enable victimologists to keep track of what is happening out on the streets. Both of these official sources of facts and figures are disseminated each year by the U.S. Depart- ment of Justice in Washington, D.C. Each of these government data collection systems has its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of provid- ing the information victimologists and criminolo- gists are seeking to answer their research questions. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR): Crime in the United States is a massive compilation of all incidents “known” to local, county, and state police departments across the country. The FBI’s UCR is a virtual “bible” of crime statistics based on victims’ com- plaints and direct observations made by officers. It is older and better known than the other official source, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS): Criminal Victimization in the United States. The BJS’s NCVS provides projections for various regions and for the entire country based on incidents vol- untarily disclosed to interviewers by a huge national sample drawn from the general public.

Facts and Figures in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR)

The UCR was established in 1927 by a committee set up by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The goal was to develop a uniform set of definitions and reporting formats for gathering crime statistics. Since 1930, the FBI has published crime data in the UCR that was forwarded volun- tarily to Washington by police departments across the United States. In recent years, more than 18,000 village, town, tribal, college, municipal,

county, and state police departments and sheriff’s departments in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and several territories that serve about 97 percent of the more than 300 million inhabit- ants of the United States participate in the data collection process, usually by sending periodic reports to state criminal justice clearinghouses. Several federal law enforcement agencies now contribute data as well (FBI, 2014).

The FBI divides up the crimes it tracks into two listings. Unfortunately, both Part I and Part II of the UCR have been of limited value to those interested in studying the actual flesh-and-blood victims rather than the incidents known to police departments or the characteristics of the persons arrested for allegedly committing them.

Part I of the UCR focuses on eight index crimes, the illegal acts most people readily think about when they hear the term “street crime.” Four index crimes count violent attacks directed “against persons”: murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The other four monitor crimes “against property”: burglary, larceny (thefts of all kinds), motor vehicle theft, and arson. (The category of arson was added in 1979 at the request of Congress when poor neighborhoods in big cities experienced many blazes of suspicious origin. However, incidents of arson are still unreliably measured because intentionally set fires might remain classified by fire marshals as being “of unknown origin.”) These eight crimes (in actual practice, seven) are termed index crimes because the FBI adds all the known incidents of each one of these categories together to compute a “crime index” that can be used for year-to-year and place-to-place comparisons to gauge the seriousness of the problem. (But note that this grand total is unweighted; that means a murder is counted as just one index crime event, the same as an attempted car theft. So the grand total [like “com- paring apples and oranges”] is a huge composite that is difficult to interpret.)

The UCR presents the number of acts of vio- lence and theft known to the authorities for cities, counties, states, regions of the country, and even many college campuses (since the mid-1990s; see

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Chapter 11). For each crime, the FBI compiles information about the number of incidents reported to the police, the total estimated losses in billions of dollars due to property crimes, the proportion of cases that were solved, and some characteristics of the suspects arrested (age, sex, race)—but, unfortu- nately for victimologists, nothing about the people who suffered harm and filed the complaints.

In Part II, the UCR only provides counts of the number of people arrested for 21 assorted offenses (but no estimates of the total number of these illegal acts committed nationwide). Some Part II crimes that lead to arrests do cause injuries to individuals, such as “offenses against women and children,” as well as “sex offenses” other than forc- ible rape and prostitution. Others do not have clearly identifiable victims, such as counterfeiting, prostitution, gambling, drunkenness, disorderly conduct, weapons possession, and drug offenses. Still other Part II arrests could have arisen from incidents that directly harm identifiable individuals, including embezzlement, fraud, vandalism, and buying/receiving/possessing stolen property.

The Uniform Crime Reporting Division fur- nishes data in separate annual publications about how many hate crimes were reported to police departments (see Chapter 11). It also issues a yearly analysis of how many law enforcement officers were feloniously assaulted and slain in the line of duty, the weapons used against them, and the assignments they were carrying out when they were injured or killed (also analyzed in Chapter 11).

From a victimologist’s point of view, the UCR’s method of data collection suffers from sev- eral shortcomings that undermine its accuracy and usefulness (see Savitz, 1982; and O’Brien, 1985). First of all, underreporting remains an intractable problem. Because many victims do not inform their local law enforcement agencies about illegal acts committed against them and their possessions (see Chapter 6), the FBI’s compilation of “crimes known to the police” is unavoidably incomplete. The annual figures about the number of reported crimes recorded as committed inevitably are lower than the actual (but unknown) number of crimes that really were carried out. Second, the UCR

focuses on accused offenders (keeping track of the age, sex, and race) but does not provide any infor- mation about the complainants who reported the incidents. Only information about murder victims (their age, sex, and race) is collected routinely (see Chapter 4). Third, the UCR lumps together reports of attempted crimes (usually not as serious for vic- tims) with completed crimes (in which offenders achieved their goals). Fourth, when computing crime rates for cities, counties, and states, the FBI counts incidents directed against all kinds of targets, adding together crimes against impersonal entities (such as businesses and government agencies) on the one hand, and individuals and households on the other. For example, the totals for robberies include bank holdups as well as muggings; statistics about bur- glaries combine attempted break-ins of offices with the ransacking of homes; figures for larcenies include goods shoplifted from department stores in addition to thefts of items swiped from parked cars.

Another shortcoming is that the FBI instructs local police departments to observe the hierarchy rule when reporting incidents: List the event under the heading of the most serious crime that took place. The ranking in the hierarchy from most ter- rible to less serious runs from murder to forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, vehicle theft, and finally larceny. For instance, if an armed intruder breaks into a home and finds a woman alone, rapes her, steals her jewelry, and drives off in her car, the entire incident will be counted for record-keeping purposes only as a forcible rape (the worst crime she endured). The fact that this person suffered other offenses at the hands of the criminal isn’t reflected in the yearly totals of known incidents. If the rapist is caught, he could also be charged with armed robbery, burglary, motor vehicle theft, possession of a deadly weapon, and possession of stolen property, even though these lesser offenses are not added to the UCR’s compilations.

Phasing in a National Incident-Based Reporting System Fortunately, the UCR is being overhauled and is becoming a much more useful source of information about individuals who are harmed

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by lawbreakers. The FBI is converting its data col- lection format to a National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).

Law enforcement officials began to call for a more extensive record-keeping system during the late 1970s. The police force in Austin, Texas, was the first to switch to this comprehensive data collection and reporting system. However, other big-city police departments that deal with a huge volume of crime reports have had trouble meeting NIBRS goals and timetables, so complete imple- mentation has been postponed repeatedly. North Dakota and South Carolina were the first two states to adopt NIBRS formatting in 1991. As of 2008, NIBRS data collection was taking place in 32 states and the District of Columbia, covering 25 percent of the nation’s population, 26 percent of its reported crimes, and 37 percent of its law enforce- ment agencies (IBR Resource Center, 2011). But the switchover seems to be proceeding very slowly. A 2012 NIBRS national report compiled figures submitted by 6,115 law enforcement agencies (only 33 percent of the over 18,000 participating departments) in 32 states that covered about 30 per- cent of the nation’s population and 28 percent of all crimes known to police departments across the country (FBI, 2014b).

One major change is the abandonment of the hierarchy rule of reporting only the worst offense that happened during a sequence of closely related events. Preserving a great many details makes it pos- sible to determine how often one crime evolves into another, such as a carjacking escalating into a kidnap- ping, or a robbery intensifying into a life-threatening shooting. For the incident cited above that was cate- gorized as a forcible rape under the hierarchy rule, this new record-keeping system also would retain information about the initial burglary; the resulting robbery; the vehicle theft; other property stolen from the victim and its value; other injuries sus- tained; the woman’s age, sex, and race; whether there was a previous relationship between her and the intruder; and the date, time, and location of the incident. Until the advent of the NIBRS com- puter database, only in cases of homicide were some of these facts extracted from police files and retained.

Another significant aspect of the overhaul is that the NIBRS provides expanded coverage of additional illegal activities. Instead of just eight closely watched UCR index offenses, FBI compu- ters are now prepared to keep track of 46 Group A offenses derived from 22 categories of crimes. In addition to the four “crimes against persons” and the four “against property” of the UCR’s Part I, the new Group A monitors offenses that formerly had been listed in Part II or just not collected at all. Victim-oriented data are becoming available for simple assault (including intimidation), vandalism (property damage and destruction), blackmail (extortion), fraud (swindles and con games), forcible sex crimes (sodomy, sexual assault with an object, and fondling), nonforcible sex offenses (statutory rape and incest), kidnapping (including parental abductions), and the nonpunishable act of justifiable homicide. The data collected about a victim of a Group A offense include these variables: sex, age, race and ethnicity, area of residence, type of injury, any prior relationship to the offender, and the circumstances surrounding the attack in cases of aggravated assault and murder. If items were stolen, the details preserved about them include the types of possession taken and their value, and in cases of motor vehicle theft, whether the car was recovered. Also, the NIBRS makes a distinction between attempted and successfully completed acts (from the criminal’s point of view) (IBR Resource Center, 2011).

Already, some data mining studies based exclu- sively on the NIBRS archives from selected states and cities address some intriguing issues. For exam- ple, an analysis of roughly 1,200 cases of abductions in the 12 states that had switched over to NIBRS by 1997 shed light on a previously overlooked subcat- egory of “holding of a person against his or her will,” called acquaintance kidnapping. This newly recognized offense includes situations such as when a teenage boy isolates his former girlfriend to punish her for spurning him, to pressure her to return to him, to compel her to submit sexually, or to evade her parents’ efforts to break them up. Also included are incidents in which street gang members spirit off rivals to intimidate them, retaliate against them, or

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even recruit them. In these types of hostage takings, the perpetrators tend to be juveniles just like their teenage targets, the abductions often take place in homes as opposed to public places, and the cap- tives are more likely to be assaulted (Finkelhor and Ormrod, 2000).

Several studies using NIBRS data from certain jurisdictions have revealed important findings about various types of murders. In general, elderly men are murdered at twice the rate as elderly women (Chu and Kraus, 2004). Specifically, older white males are the most frequent victims of “eldercide”; they are killed predominantly by offenders who are below the age of 45 and tend to be complete stran- gers. Female senior citizens are more likely to be slain by assailants who are older than 45 and are often either a spouse or grown child (Krienert and Walsh, 2010). Murders of intimate partners tend to be committed late at night, during weekends, and in the midst of certain holidays more often than at other times (Vazquez, Stohr, and Purkiss, 2005). Also, the higher homicide rate in Southern cities actually may not be due to a presumed subculture of violence or “code of honor” that supposedly compels individuals likely to lose fights and suffer beatings to nevertheless stand up to the aggressors to save face (Chilton, 2004).

Facts and Figures in the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)

Victimologists and criminologists have reservations about the accuracy of the official records kept by police departments that form the basis of the FBI’s UCR as well as its NIBRS. Tallies maintained by local law enforcement agencies surely are incom- plete due to victim nonreporting. Also, on occa- sion, these closely watched statistics may be distorted by police officials as a result of political pressures to either downplay or inflate the total number of incidents in their jurisdiction in order to manipulate public opinion about the seriousness of the local crime problem or the effectiveness of their crime-fighting strategies (for example, see Eterno and Silverman, 2012).

Dissatisfaction with official record-keeping practices has led criminologists to collect their own data. The first method used was the self- report survey. Small samples of people were promised anonymity and confidentiality if they would “confess” on questionnaires about the crimes they had committed. This line of inquiry consis- tently revealed greater volumes of illegal acts than were indicated by official statistics in government reports. Self-report surveys confirmed the hypothe- sis that large numbers of people broke the law (especially during their teens and twenties), but most were never investigated, arrested, or con- victed, especially if they were members of middle- or upper-class families. But self-reports about offending did not shed any light on those who were on the receiving end of these illegal acts.

After establishing the usefulness of self-report surveys about offenses, the next logical step for researchers was to query people from all walks of life about any street crimes that may have been committed against them rather than by them. These self-report studies originally were called “victim surveys.” But that label was somewhat misleading because most respondents answered that they were not victims—they had not been harmed by street crimes during the time period in question.

The first national survey about victimization (based on a random sample of 10,000 households) was carried out in 1966 for the President’s Com- mission on Law Enforcement and the Administra- tion of Justice. It immediately confirmed one suspicion: A sizable percentage of individuals in the sample who told interviewers that they had suf- fered losses and/or sustained injuries acknowledged that they had not reported the incident to the police. This proof of the existence of what was termed the “dark figure” (meaning a murky, mys- terious, imprecise number) of unreported crimes further undercut confidence in the accuracy of the FBI’s UCR statistics for all offenses except murder. Confirming the existence of unreported crime also underscored the importance of continuing this alternative way of measuring victimization rates and trends by directly asking members of the gen- eral public about their recent experiences.

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In 1972, the federal government initiated a yearly survey of businesses as well as residents in 26 large cities, but the project was discontinued in 1976. In 1973, the Census Bureau began interview- ing members of a huge, randomly selected, nation- wide, stratified, multistage sample of households (clustered by geographic counties). Until 1992, the undertaking was known as the National Crime Survey (NCS). After some revisions, it was retitled the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

The Aspects of Victimization That It Measures NCVS respondents answer questions from a survey that runs more than 20 pages. They are interviewed every six months for three years. The questioning begins with a series of screening items, such as, “During the last six months did any- one break into your home?” If the respondent answers yes, follow-up questions are asked to col- lect details about the incident.

When completed, the survey provides a great deal of data about the number of violent and prop- erty crimes committed against the respondents, the extent of any physical injuries or financial losses they sustained, and the location and time of the incidents. It also keeps track of the age, sex, race/ ethnicity, marital status, income level, and place of residence of the people disclosing their misfortunes to survey interviewers. The survey records the vic- tims’ perceptions about the perpetrators (in terms of whether they seemed to have been drinking and if they appeared to be members of a gang), whether they used weapons, and what self-protective measures—if any—the respondents took before, during, and after the attack. Additional questions probe into any prior relationships between them, as well as the reasons why they did or did not report the crime to the police.

The survey is person-centered. It is geared toward uncovering the suffering of individuals 12 years of age or older and the losses experienced by entire households (but not of workplaces, such as burglaries of offices or robberies of banks). The questionnaire focuses on crimes of violence (forc- ible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) just like the UCR, plus simple assault, but not murder.

It also inquires about two kinds of thefts from indi- viduals (personal larceny with contact like purse snatching and pickpocketing, and without any direct contact), and three types of stealing directed at the common property of households—burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft—again, just like the UCR (except that crimes against collectivities like organizations and commercial enterprises are not included in the NCVS but are counted in the UCR). Identity theft is now examined, but the list of possible offenses is far from exhaustive. For example, respondents are not quizzed about instances of kidnapping, swindling, blackmail, extortion, and property damage due to vandalism or arson.

The benefit of survey research is that it elimi- nates the futility of attempting the impossible: inter- viewing every person (of the nearly 265 million people 12 years old or older residing in the entire United States in 2013) to find out how he or she fared in the past year. The combined experiences of just about 160,000 individuals over the age of 11 living in roughly 90,000 households randomly selected to be in the national sample in 2013 can be projected to derive estimates of the total number of people throughout the country who were robbed, raped, or beaten, and of households that suffered burglaries, larcenies, or car thefts (Truman and Langton, 2014).

Shortcomings of the Data At the survey’s incep- tion, the idea of asking people about their recent misfortunes was hailed as a major breakthrough that would provide more accurate statistics than those found in the UCR. But, for a number of reasons, the technique has not turned out to be the fool- proof method for measuring the “actual” amount of interpersonal violence and theft that some victimol- ogists had hoped it would be. (For more extensive critiques of the methodology, see Levine, 1976; Garofalo, 1981; Skogan, 1981b, 1986; Lehnen and Skogan, 1981; Reiss, 1981, 1986; Schneider, 1981; O’Brien, 1985; Mayhew and Hough, 1988; Fattah, 1991; and Lynch and Addington, 2007).

First, the findings of this survey, like any other, are reliable only to the extent that the national

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sample is truly representative of the population of the whole country. If the sample is biased (in terms of factors connected to victimization, such as age, gender, race, class, and geographical location), then the projections made about the experiences of the roughly 250 million people who actually were not questioned in 2013 will be either too high or too low. Because the NCVS is household based, it might fail to fully capture the experiences of tran- sients (such as homeless persons and inmates) or people who wish to keep a low profile (such as “illegal” immigrants or fugitives).

Second, the credibility of what people tell poll- sters is a constant subject of debate and a matter of continuing concern in this survey. Underreporting remains a problem because communication barriers can inhibit respondents from disclosing details about certain crimes committed against them (inci- dents that they also probably refused to bring to the attention of the police). Any systematic suppression of the facts, such as the unwillingness of wives to reveal that their husbands beat them, of teenage girls to divulge that they suffered date rapes, or of young men to admit that they were robbed while trying to buy illicit drugs or a prostitute’s sexual services, will throw off the survey’s projection of the true state of affairs. Furthermore, crimes com- mitted against children under 12 are not probed (so no information is forthcoming about physical and sexual abuse by caretakers, or molestations or kid- nappings by acquaintances or strangers). Memory decay (forgetting about incidents) also results in information losses, especially about minor offenses that did not involve serious injuries or expenses.

But overreporting can occur as well. Some respondents may exaggerate or deliberately lie for a host of personal motives. Experienced detectives filter out any accounts by complainants that do not sound believable. They deem the charges to be “unfounded” and decide that no further investiga- tion is warranted (see Chapter 6). But there is no such quality control over what people tell NCVS interviewers. The police don’t accept all reports of crimes at face value, but pollsters must. “Stolen” objects actually may have been misplaced, and an accidentally shattered window may be mistaken as

evidence of an attempted break-in. Also, no verifi- cation of assertions takes place. If a person in the sample discusses a crime that was supposedly reported to the local police, there is no attempt to double-check to see if the respondent’s recollec- tions coincide with the information in the depart- ment’s case files. Forward telescoping is the tendency to vividly remember traumatic events and therefore believe that a serious crime occurred more recently than it actually did (within the sur- vey’s reference period of “the previous six months”). It contributes to overreporting because respondents think a crime should be counted, when actually it was committed long before and ought to be excluded.

Because being targeted within the previous six months is a relatively rare event, tens of thousands of people must be polled to find a sufficient number of individuals with incidents worthy of discussion to meet the requirements for statistical soundness. For example, about 1,000 people must be interviewed in order to locate just a handful who were recently robbed. Estimates derived from small subsamples (such as robbery victims who are elderly and female) have large margins of error. The NCVS therefore requires a huge sample and becomes very expensive to carry out.

Even with a relatively large number of partici- pants, the findings of the survey can only describe the situation in the nation as a whole. The serious- ness of the crime problem in a particular city, county, or state cannot be accurately determined because the national sample is not large enough to break down into local subgroups of sufficient size for statistical analysis (with a few exceptions). Fur- thermore, the projected absolute number of inci- dents (offenses committed and victims harmed) and the relative rates (victims per 1,000 people per year) are really estimates at the midpoint of a range (what statisticians call a confidence inter- val). Therefore, NCVS rates always must be regarded as approximate, plus or minus a certain correction factor (margin of error) that depends mostly on the size of the entire sample (all respon- dents) and becomes statistically questionable for a very small specific subsample, such as low-income

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young men, living in cities, who were robbed within the last six months.

The NCVS has improved over the years as better ways have been devised to draw representa- tive samples, to determine which incidents coincide with or don’t fit the FBI’s uniform crime definition, and to jog respondents’ memories (Taylor, 1989). In particular, more explicit questions were added about sexual assaults (involving unwanted or coerced sexual contact) that fell short of the legal definition of forcible rape and about instances of domestic violence (simple assaults) (Hoover, 1994; and Kindermann, Lynch, and Cantor, 1997).

Over its four decades, the survey’s questions have been refocused, clarified, and improved. But the accuracy of the NCVS has suffered because of waves of budget cuts. To save money, the sample size has been trimmed repeatedly. Over the dec- ades, expensive “paper and pencil interviews” (PAPI) carried out at people’s homes have been replaced by follow-up phone calls (computer- assisted telephone interviews [CATI]) and mail-in questionnaires. The response rate for individuals who were invited to participate has held steady at about 88 percent; in other words, 12 percent of the people chosen for the study declined to answer questions in 2010 as well as in 2013 (Truman, 2011; and Truman and Langton, 2014).

Comparing the UCR and the NCVS

For victimologists, the greater variety of statistics published in the NCVS offer many more possibili- ties for analysis and interpretation than the much more limited data in the UCR. But both official sources have their advantages, and the two can be considered to complement each other.

The UCR, not the NCVS, is the source to turn to for information about murder victims because questions about homicide don’t appear on the BJS’s survey. (However, two other valuable, detailed, and accurate databases for studying homi- cide victims are death certificates as well as public health records maintained by local coroners’ and medical examiners’ offices. These files may contain information about the slain person’s sex, age, race/

ethnicity, ancestry, birthplace, occupation, educa- tional attainment, and zip code of last known address [for examples of how this non-UCR data can be analyzed, see Karmen, 2006]).

The UCR is also the publication that presents information about officers slain in the line of duty, college students harmed on campuses, and hate crimes directed against various groups. The UCR is the place to go for geographically based statistics; it provides data about the crimes reported to law enforcement agencies in different towns and cities, entire metropolitan areas, and counties, states, and regions of the country. NCVS figures are calculated for the whole country, four geographic regions, and urban/suburban/rural areas, but are not available for specific cities, counties, or states (because the subsamples would be too small to analyze). The UCR, but not the NCVS, calculates the overall proportion of reported crimes that are solved by police departments. Incidents counted in the UCR can be considered as having passed through two sets of authenticity filters: Victims felt what happened was serious enough to notify the author- ities shortly afterward, and officers who filled out the reports believed that the complainants were telling the truth as supported by some evidence. Although limited information about arrestees is provided in the UCR, this annual report doesn’t provide any descriptions of the persons harmed by those accused rapists, robbers, assailants, burglars, and other thieves (until the NIBRS replaces current record-keeping formats).

NCVS interviewers collect a great deal of information about the respondents who claim they were harmed by street crimes. The NCVS is the source to turn to for a more inclusive account- ing of what happened during a given year because it contains information about incidents that were but also were not reported to the police. The yearly surveys are not affected by any changes in the degree of cooperation—or level of tension—between com- munity residents and their local police, by improve- ments in record-keeping by law enforcement agencies, or by temporary crackdowns in which all incidents are taken more seriously. But the NCVS interviewers must accept at face value the

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accounts respondents describe. Also, the NCVS annual report has nothing to offer about murders, line-of-duty assaults and deaths of police officers, offenses committed against children under 12, robberies and burglaries directed at commercial establishments, and injuries and losses from inten- tionally set fires.

Even when both of these official sources col- lect data about the same crimes, the findings might not be strictly comparable. First of all, the defini- tions of certain offenses (such as rape) can vary, so the numerators may not count the same incidents. The UCR kept track only of rapes of women and girls (sexual assaults against boys and men were considered as “forcible sodomy”) until a gender- neutral definition that explicitly described all forms of intrusive bodily invasions was adopted in 2011. The NCVS counts sexual assaults against males as well as females. Similarly, the definitions of rob- bery and burglary are not the same in the two official record-keeping sources. For example, the UCR includes robberies of commercial establish- ments and burglaries of offices, but the NCVS does not.

In addition, the denominators differ. While the FBI computes incidents of violence “per 100,000 people,” the BJS calculates incidents “per 1,000 people age 12 or older.” For property crimes, the NCVS denominator is “per 1,000 households,” not individuals (the average household has between two and three people living in it).

Therefore, it is difficult to make direct compar- isons between the findings of the UCR and the NCVS. The best way to take full advantage of these two official sources of data from the federal government is to focus on the unique information provided by each data collection system.

Even when the new and improved NIBRS data storage system is taken into account, several important variables are not tracked by any of these government monitoring systems. For exam- ple, information about the victims’ education, occu- pation, ancestry, birthplace, and rap sheet is not collected by the UCR, the NIBRS, or the NCVS. Yet these background variables could be crucial to investigate certain issues (like robbers preying on

recent immigrants or murders of persons known to be involved in the drug scene).

A First Glance at the Big Picture: Estimates of the Number of New Crime Victims Each Year

To start to bring the big picture in focus, a first step would be to look up how many Americans reveal that they were victims of street crimes each year.

The absolute numbers are staggering: Police forces across the nation learned about nearly 1.25 million acts of “violence against persons” during 2013, according to the FBI’s (2014) annual Uniform Crime Reports. In addition, over 9 million thefts were reported to the police (however, some were carried out against stores or offices, not individuals or families). The situation was even worse, accord- ing to the BJS’ National Crime Victimization Survey. It projected that people 12 years old and over suf- fered an estimated 6.1 million acts of violence, and households experienced close to 16.8 million thefts during 2013 (Truman and Langton, 2014).

Some individuals and households are victim- ized more than once in a year, so the number of incidents might be greater than the number of peo- ple. Then again, in some incidents, more than one person might be harmed, so the number of people could be larger than the number of criminal events. Either way, it is obvious that each year, millions of Americans are initiated into a group that they did not want to be part of: They join the ranks of those who know what it is like from firsthand experience to endure crime-inflicted injuries and losses.

A Second Look at the Big Picture: Watching the FBI’s Crime Clock

Consider another set of statistics intended to sum- marize the big picture that are issued yearly by the FBI in its authoritative UCR. This set is called the Crime Clock, and it dramatizes the fact that as time passes—each and every second, minute, hour, and day—the toll keeps mounting, as more and more people join the ranks of crime victims (see Figure 3.1).

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The Crime Clock’s statistics are calculated in a straightforward manner. The total number of inci- dents of each kind of crime that were reported to all the nation’s 18,000 plus police departments is divided into the number of seconds (60 � 60 � 24 � 365 ¼ 31,536,000) or minutes (60 � 24 � 365 ¼ 525,600) in a year. For instance, about 14,200 people were slain in the United States in 2013. The calculation (525,600/14,200 ¼ 37) indi- cates that every 37 minutes another American was murdered that year (FBI, 2014).

Just a glance at this chart alerts even the casual reader to its chilling message. The big picture it portrays is that crimes of violence (one every 27 seconds) and theft (one every 4 seconds) are all too common. As the Crime Clock ticks away, a

steady stream of casualties flows into morgues, hospital emergency rooms, and police stations throughout the nation. At practically every moment, someone somewhere in the United States is experiencing what it feels like to be harmed by a criminal. These grim reminders give the impression that becoming a victim someday is virtually inevi- table. It seems to be just a matter of time before one’s “number is called” and disaster strikes. Sooner or later, it will be every American’s “turn”—or so it appears.

Furthermore, it can be argued that these alarm- ing figures revealed by the Crime Clock are actually underestimates of how dangerous the streets of the United States really are, due to a shortcoming in the report’s methodology. The big picture is really

One murder

every 37 minutes

One forcible rape

every 7 minutes

One robbery

every 90 seconds

One burglary

every 16 seconds

One larceny-theft

every 5 seconds

One motor vehicle theft

every 45 seconds

One aggravated assault

every 44 seconds

One violent crime

every 27 seconds

One crime index offense

every 4 seconds

One property crime every 4 seconds

60

30

55 5

35 25

50 10

40 20

45 15

F I G U R E 3.1 The FBI’s Crime Clock, 2013 SOURCE: FBI, 2014.

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much worse. The FBI’s calculations are based solely upon crimes known to police forces across the country. But, of course, not all illegal acts are brought to the attention of the authorities. The police find out about only a fraction of all the inci- dents of violence and an even smaller proportion of the thefts that occur because many victims do not share their personal troubles with the uniformed officers or detectives of their local police depart- ments. The reporting rate varies from crime to crime, place to place, year to year, and group to group (see Chapter 6 for more details about victim reporting rates). Hence, one way to look at these Crime Clock statistics is to assume that they repre- sent the tip of the iceberg: The actual number of people harmed by offenders in these various ways must be considerably higher.

However, the only disclaimer the FBI offers is this: “The Crime Clock should be viewed with care. The most aggregate representation of UCR data, it conveys the annual reported crime experi- ence by showing a relative frequency of occurrence of the Part I index offenses. It should not be taken to imply a regularity in the commission of crime. The Crime Clock represents the annual ratio of crime to fixed time intervals” (FBI, 2014, p. 44). In other words, the reader is being reminded that in reality, the number of offenses carried out by lawbreakers ebbs and flows, varying with the time of day, day of the week, and season. These Crime Clock numbers represent projections over the course of an entire year and not the actual timing of the attacks. These street crimes do not take place with such rigid regularity or predictability.

The Crime Clock mode of presentation— which has appeared in the UCR for decades—has inherent shock value because as it ticks away, the future seems so ominous. Members of the public can be frightened into thinking they may be next and that their time is nearly up—if they haven’t already suffered in some manner at least once.

This countdown approach lends itself to media sensationalism, fear-mongering political campaigns, and marketing ploys. Heightened anxieties can be exploited to garner votes and to boost the sales of burglar alarms, automobile antitheft devices, or

crime insurance. For example, according to the Better Business Bureau (2014), a common phone scam begins with a warning based on this type of Crime Clock “data”: “The FBI reports that there is a home break-in in the United States every 15 seconds.…” The robocall then invites the fright- ened recipient to sign up for a “free” security system that, of course, has many hidden costs.

Delving Deeper into the Big Picture: Examining Victimization Rates

Statistics always must be scrutinized carefully, double-checked, and then put into perspective with some context. Victimologists and criminolo- gists look at both raw numbers and rates. Raw numbers reveal the actual numbers of victims. For example, the body count or the death toll is a raw number indicating how many people were dis- patched by murderers. Rates are the appropriate measurements to use when comparing the inci- dence of crime in populations of unequal size, such as the seriousness of the violence problem in different cities or countries, or at different periods of time.

The UCR could offer another disclaimer—but doesn’t—that the Crime Clock’s figures are unnec- essarily alarming because they lack an important measurement of risk—the recognition that there are millions of potential targets throughout the nation. The ticking away of the Crime Clock is an unduly frightening way of depicting the big pic- ture because it uses seconds, minutes, hours, or days as the denominator of the fraction. An alternative formulation could be used in the calculation: one that places the reported number of victimizations in the numerator of the fraction and the (huge) num- ber of people or possessions who are in danger of being singled out by criminals into the denomina- tor. Because there are so many hundreds of millions of residents, homes, and automobiles that could be selected by predators on the prowl, the actual chances of any given individual experiencing an incident during the course of a year may not be so high or so worrisome at all. This denominator provides some context.

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This alternative calculation—using a large denominator, “per 100,000 persons per year”— puts the problem in perspective and can yield a very different impression. In fact, the UCR does present these “crime rates”—which also could be called “victimization rates”—right after the Crime Clock in every yearly report. It seems to make a world of difference in terms of context. The implicit message when rates are calculated is almost the opposite: Don’t worry so much about being targeted. These misfortunes will probably burden someone else.

Indeed, the UCR’s yearly findings seem rel- atively reassuring, suggesting that the odds of being harmed are not at all as ominous as the Crime Clock implies. For example, the Crime Clock warned that a violent crime took place about every 27 seconds during 2013. That understandably sounds frightening because vio- lence is the part of the street crime problem that the public worries about the most. How- ever, when the UCR findings are presented with a huge denominator as a rate (per 100,000 persons per year), the figure seems less worri- some. For every 100,000 Americans, only 368 were subjected to a violent attack during 2013. Another way of expressing that same rate is that 99,632 out of every 100,000 persons made it through the year unscathed. Put still another way, only about 0.4 percent (far less than 1 per- cent) of the public complained to the police that they had been raped, robbed, or assaulted that year (or they were murdered). (Remember, however, that not all acts of violence are reported; some robberies were of stores or banks, or other commercial enterprises or offices; and also, some individuals face much higher or much lower risks of being targeted, as will be explained in Chapter 4.)

As described above, victimization rates also are computed and disseminated by another branch of the U.S. Department of Justice, the BJS. Its estimates about the chances of being harmed come from a different source—not

police files, but a nationwide survey of the pop- ulation: the NCVS. The survey’s findings are presented as rates per 1,000 persons per year for violent crimes, and per 1,000 households per year for property crimes (in contrast to the UCR’s per 100,000 per year; to compare the two sets of statistics, just move the NCVS fig- ure’s decimal point two places to the right to indicate the rate per 100,000). The NCVS’s find- ings indicated that 23.2 out of every 1,000 resi- dents age 12 and over in the United States (or 2,320 per 100,000, or 2.3 percent) were on the receiving end of an act of violence during 2013. (This estimate is substantially greater than the UCR figure because it includes those incidents that were not reported to the police but were disclosed to the interviewers; and it counts a huge number of less serious simple assaults while the UCR only counts more serious aggra- vated assaults—for definitions, see Box 3.1 below.) Furthermore, the NCVS supplies some reassuring details that are not available from the UCR: The rate of injury was about 6 per 1,000 (Truman and Langton, 2014). In other words, the victim was not physically wounded in about three quarters of the confrontations. Accentuating the positive (interpreting these sta- tistics with an “upbeat” spin), despite widespread public concern, for every 1,000 residents of the United States (over the age of 11), 977 were never confronted and 994 were not wounded during 2013.

In sum, the two sources of data—the UCR and the NCVS—published by separate agencies in the federal government strive to be reasonably accurate and trustworthy. What differs is the way the statis- tics are collected and presented. Each format lends itself to a particular interpretation or spin. The UCR’s Crime Clock calculations focus on the number of persons harmed per hour, minute, or even second. But stripped of context, these figures are unduly alarming because they give the impres- sion that being targeted is commonplace. They ignore the fact that the overwhelming majority of

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Americans went about their daily lives throughout the year without interference from criminals. The rates per 100,000 published in the UCR and per 1,000 in the NCVS juxtapose the small numbers who were preyed upon against the huge numbers who got away unscathed in any given year. This mode of presenting the same facts yields a very dif- ferent impression: a rather reassuring message that being targeted is a relatively unusual event.

Tapping into the UCR and the NCVS to Fill in the Details of the Big Picture

The two official sources of government statistics can yield useful information that answers impor- tant questions about everyday life, such as, “How often does interpersonal violence break out?” (Note that when working with statistics and rounding off numbers such as body counts and murder rates, it is easy to forget that each death represents a terrible tragedy for the real people whose lives were prematurely terminated, and a devastating loss for their families.)

The BJS’s definitions that are used by NCVS interviewers appear side by side in Table 3.1 with the FBI’s definitions that are followed by police departments transmitting their figures to the UCR. Also shown are the estimated numbers of incidents and victimization rates for 2013 derived from both data collecting programs.

Glancing at the data from the UCR and the NCVS presented in Table 3.1, the big picture takes shape. Note that the numbers of incidents and the victimization rates from the NCVS are often higher than the UCR figures for each type of offense. The main reason is that the NCVS num- bers include crimes not reported to the police, and therefore not forwarded to FBI headquarters for inclusion in the UCR.

Both sources of data expose a widely believed myth. Contrary to any false impressions gained from news media coverage and television or movie plots, people suffer from violent crimes

much less frequently than from property crimes. Every year, larceny (thefts of all kinds, a broad catch-all category) is the most common crime of all. Burglary is the second most widespread form of victimization, and motor vehicle theft ranks third. According to NCVS findings, thefts of possessions—the stealing of items left unattended outdoors plus property or cash taken by someone invited into the home, such as a cleaning person or guest—touched an estimated 10,050 out of every 100,000 households, or roughly 10 per- cent, in 2013. Fortunately, this kind of victimi- zation turns out to be the least serious; most of these thefts would be classified as petty larcenies because the dollar amount stolen was less than some threshold specified by state laws, such as $1,000). The NCVS finding about how common thefts are each year is confirmed by the UCR. Larcenies of all kinds (including shoplifting from stores in the UCR definition) vastly out- number all other types of crimes reported to police departments.

As for violent crimes, fortunately a similar pat- tern emerges: The most common is the least serious type. Simple assaults (punching, kicking, shoving, and slapping) are far more likely to be inflicted than aggravated assaults, robberies, rapes, or mur- ders. Aggravated assaults, which are intended to seriously wound or kill, ranked second in frequency on the NCVS. According to the UCR, aggravated or “felonious assaults” were the most common type of violent offense reported to the police, but that is because the UCR doesn’t monitor the number of simple assaults committed. Only the number of arrests for simple assaults, not the number of inci- dents, appears in Part II of the UCR; the NIBRS keeps track of statistics for both simple and aggra- vated assaults but a nationwide tally is not yet possible.

Because so many complicated situations can arise, interviewers for the NCVS receive instruc- tions about how to categorize the incidents victims disclose to them. Similarly, the FBI publishes a manual for police departments to follow when

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T A B L E 3.1 Estimated Nationwide Victimization Rates from the UCR and the NCVS, 2013

Crime Definition Incidents Rate (per 100,000)

FBI’s UCR Definitions

Murder The willful (nonnegligent) killing of one human being by another; includes manslaughter and deaths due to recklessness; excludes deaths due to accidents, suicides, and justifiable homicides.

14,200 4.5

Forcible Rape The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will; includes attempts; excludes other sexual assaults and statutory rape.

80,000 25

Robbery The taking of or attempting to take anything of value from the care, cus- tody, or control of a person or persons by force or threat of force; includes commercial establishments and carjackings, armed and unarmed.

345,000 109

Aggravated Assault The unlawful attacking of one person by another for the purpose of inflicting severe bodily injury, often by using a deadly weapon; includes attempted murder and severe beatings of family members; excludes simple, unarmed, minor assaults.

724,000 229

Simple Assault No weapon used, minor wounds inflicted Not measured Not computed Burglary The unlawful entry of a structure to commit a felony or theft;

includes unlawful entry without applying force to residences and commercial and government premises.

1,928,000 610

Larceny-Theft The unlawful taking, carrying, leading, or riding away of property from the possession of another; includes purse snatching, pocket picking, thefts from vehicles, thefts of parts of vehicles, and sho- plifting; excludes the use of force or fraud to obtain possessions.

6,004,000 1,900

Motor Vehicle Theft The theft or attempted driving away of vehicle; includes automobiles, trucks, buses, motorcycles, snowmobiles, and commercially owned vehicles; excludes farm machinery and boats and planes.

700,000 221

BJS’s NCVS Definitions

Murder Not included in the survey Not measured Not computed Rape/Sexual Assault

Rape is the unlawful penetration of a male or female through the use of force or threats of violence; includes all bodily orifices, the use of objects, and attempts as well as verbal threats. Sexual assaults are unwanted sex- ual contacts, such as grabbing or fondling; includes attempts and may not involve force; excludes molestations of children under 12.

174,000 110

Robbery The taking directly from a person of property or cash by force or threat of force, with or without a weapon; includes attempts; excludes hold-ups of commercial establishments.

369,000 240

Aggravated Assault The attacking of person with a weapon, regardless of whether an injury is sustained; includes attempts as well as physical assaults without a weapon that result in serious injuries; excludes severe physical abuse of children under 12.

633,000 380

Simple Assault The attacking of person without a weapon resulting in minor wounds or no physical injury; includes attempts and intrafamily violence.

2,047,000 1,580