Crime Index
Reported rates of six serious offenses in the jurisdiction a law enforcement agency polices, and an index summarizing them.
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Sources: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, Return A, compiled by Jacob Kaplan and Florida Incident-Based Reporting System · Geography: law enforcement jurisdiction
Offenses reported to a law enforcement agency, as an annual rate per 100,000 residents of the jurisdiction it polices. The index summarizes the six rates below; each is also published on its own.
Outside Florida the counts come from Jacob Kaplan's compilation of the FBI's Return A monthly agency submissions, distributed through openICPSR (Offenses Known and Clearances by Arrest, 1960-2024, CC BY 4.0), not from the FBI directly. Florida agencies largely report to their own state system instead, so Florida counts come from FDLE's FIBRS offense detail.
Definitions below are the FBI's (Offense Definitions); Florida's categories follow the FDLE FIBRS data dictionary.
Metrics in this family#
Crime index
A single figure summarizing the six offense rates below. It has no natural unit and is reported only as a position relative to other places — see how indexes are calculated.
Homicide rate
Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter: "the willful (nonnegligent) killing of one human being by another. Deaths caused by negligence, attempts to kill, assaults to kill, suicides, and accidental deaths are excluded."
Robbery rate
"The taking or attempting to take anything of value from the care, custody, or control of a person or persons by force or threat of force or violence and/or by putting the victim in fear."
Aggravated assault rate
"An unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury. This type of assault usually is accompanied by the use of a weapon or by means likely to produce death or great bodily harm. Simple assaults are excluded."
Burglary rate
"The unlawful entry of a structure to commit a felony or a theft. Attempted forcible entry is included."
Theft rate
Larceny-theft, except motor vehicle theft: "the unlawful taking, carrying, leading, or riding away of property from the possession or constructive possession of another." Embezzlement, confidence games, forgery and check fraud are excluded.
Motor vehicle theft rate
"The theft or attempted theft of a motor vehicle. A motor vehicle is self-propelled and runs on land surface and not on rails. Motorboats, construction equipment, airplanes, and farming equipment are specifically excluded."
Considerations#
Rates cover 2021 through 2024, the years in the most recent compiled release. Publication lags the present.
The geography is the agency's jurisdiction, not the neighborhood. A tract inside a city carries that city's rate; a tract no municipal department serves carries its county sheriff's rate. Crime varies sharply within a jurisdiction, so read these as context for the surrounding area, not as a measurement of the tract.
Reporting is voluntary and incomplete, the family's largest limitation. An agency may submit every month, some months, or none, and coverage shifted around the 2021 move to incident-based reporting. Hawaii is the thinnest-reporting state in the country: for 2024 only two Hawaii agencies submitted a full twelve months. Florida is nearly as thin nationally, which is why its own system supplies its counts here. We do not treat every figure as equally reliable: where an agency reports no offenses of a kind and its surroundings make that implausible, the figure carries reduced weight in the index, or none. That does not repair thin reporting. A jurisdiction submitting part of a year is still shown, and a low rate can mean few submissions rather than little crime.
Florida differs in other ways: its offense categories are FDLE's, not the FBI's, and only agencies matched to the municipality they police are covered.
Reported crime is not the same as crime. The FBI notes that a city "may report more crime than a comparable one, not because there is more crime, but rather because its law enforcement agency, through proactive efforts, identifies more offenses" (Caution Against Ranking).
Rape and other sexual offenses are collected by both programs but are not published here: the FBI revised its rape definition in 2013, and FDLE's forcible sex category is not identical to the FBI's, so the counts are not comparable across the places we cover.
Rates use the population each agency reports for the area it serves, not always that of the corresponding municipality.
References#
- 1Offenses Known and Clearances by Arrest, 1960-2024https://doi.org/10.3886/E100707V22
- 2FIBRS offense detailhttps://www.fdle.state.fl.us/cjab/fibrs
- 3Offense Definitionshttps://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/offense-definitions.pdf
- 4FDLE FIBRS data dictionaryhttps://www.fdle.state.fl.us/CJAB/Documents/FTD/FIBRS_Data_Dictionary_FDLE_IEPD_v1_0
- 5Caution Against Rankinghttps://ucr.fbi.gov/cautionagainstranking.pdf