3Victimization inthe United StatesAn OverviewCHAPTE.docx

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Victimization in
the United States:
An Overview
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.
V I C TI M I Z A TI ON I N T H E U N I T ED S T A T ES : A
N O V E R V I E W 67
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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
Household Burglary The unlawful entry of residence, garage, or
shed, usually but not
always, for the purpose of theft; includes attempts; excludes

commercial or governmental premises.
2,458,000 2,570 (per 100,000
households)
Theft The theft of property or cash without contact; includes
attempts to
take possessions and stealing by persons invited inside.
9,071,000 10,050 (per 100,000
households)
Motor Vehicle Theft The driving away or taking without
authorization of any household’s
motorized vehicle; includes attempts.
556,000 520 (per 100,000
households)
NOTES: All UCR and NCVS figures for incidents were rounded
off to the nearest 1,000, except for murder, which is rounded off
to the nearest 100.
All NCVS rates were multiplied by 100 to make them
comparable to UCR rates.
The FBI definition of rape is the old narrow one, referred to as
the “legacy” definition, not the new expanded one.
SOURCES: FBI’s UCR, 2013; BJS’s NCVS, 2013 (Truman and
Langton, 2014).
82 CH APT ER 3
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they submit records to the UCR about the crimes
they are aware of that were committed in their
jurisdiction. These guidelines are intended to insure
that the annual crime reports are genuinely
“uniform”—in the sense that the same definitions
and standards are used by each of the roughly
18,000 participating law enforcement agencies.
For example, all police and sheriffs’ departments
are supposed to exclude from their body count of
murders all cases of vehicular homicides caused by
drunk and impaired drivers; accidental deaths; justi-

fiable homicides carried out by officers of the law or
by civilians acting in self-defense; and suicides. But
some very complex situations may arise on rare
occasions and need to be clarified, so guidelines
for scoring them on the UCR are disseminated by
the FBI. Some of these instructions appear in
Box 3.1 below. (Note that local prosecutors might
view these crimes differently.)
Poring over “details” like the precise wording
of definitions and arguing over what should and
should not be included and counted, or excluded
and not monitored, may seem like a rather dry
technical exercise and even a “boring” waste of
time. However, definitions and the statistics derived
from them can really matter. For example, consider
the implications of this issue:
Police officials and women’s groups …
applauded a recommendation by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation subcommittee that the
definition of rape used by the agency be
revised. The definition, written more than
80 years ago, has been criticized as too narrow,
resulting in thousands of rapes being excluded
from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. The
subcommittee recommends a broader defini-
tion, to include anal and oral rape as well as
rapes involving male victims. (Goode, 2011).
What would be the consequence of adopting
the more inclusive definition? Initially, forcible
rape rates as monitored by this government source
would rise, reflecting a more comprehensive and
accurate count of the actual amount of sexual
violence in the United States. That larger statistic

could result in the allocation of additional federal,
state, and local resources to fund efforts to catch
and prosecute more rapists, and to provide support
and assistance to a greater number of victims
(Goode, 2011).
Searching for Changes in the Big Picture:
Detecting Trends in Interpersonal Violence
and Theft
The data in the annual UCR as well as the NCVS
represent the situation in the streets and homes
of America after a particular year has drawn to a
close. These yearly reports can be likened to a snap-
shot at a certain point in time. But what about a
movie or video that reveals changes over time? To
make the big picture more useful, a crucial question
that must be answered is whether street crime is
becoming more or less of a problem as the years
roll by.
Sharp increases in rates over several consecutive
years are commonly known as crime waves.
Downward trends indicating reduced levels of
criminal activity can take place as well. Ironically,
there isn’t a good term to describe a sudden yet
sustained improvement in public safety. Perhaps
the term crime crash (see Karmen, 2006) captures
the essence of such a largely unexpected, year-
after-year downturn (just as a quick plunge in the
price of shares on the stock market is called a crash,
except that a “crime crash” goes on for years before
it is noticeable, and then is welcomed).
During the late 1960s, a major crime wave

engulfed the country, according to the FBI’s UCR,
which was the only annual source of nationwide
data during that decade. Since 1973, the findings of
the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) NCVS have
provided an additional set of figures to monitor the
upward and downward drifts in victimization rates.
The establishment of a second, independent report-
ing system to measure the amount of street crime in
contemporary American society initially appeared to
be a major breakthrough in terms of bringing the big
picture into sharper focus. In theory, the federal gov-
ernment’s two monitoring systems should support
and confirm each other’s findings, lending greater
credence to all official statistics shared with the
authorization.
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public. But in practice, estimates from the UCR and
the NCVS have diverged for particular categories of
offenses during certain brief stretches of time, cloud-
ing the big picture about national trends (Rand &
Rennison, 2002).
The UCR measures the violent crime rate by
adding together all the known cases of murder,
forcible rape, aggravated assault, and robbery. The
NCVS doesn’t ask about murder (a relatively small
number) but it does inquire about simple assaults (a
huge number). The BJS then combines all disclosed
cases of simple and aggravated assault, all sexual
assaults (of males as well as females), and some rob-
beries (only of people, not banks or stores) into its
violent crime rate. Other differences in data collec-
tion methodology plus divergent definitions that
B O X 3.1 The FBI’s Instructions About How to Classify
Certain Complicated
Crimes: Guidelines from the Uniform Crime Reporting
Handbook
Part A. Does the death of the victim fall into the category

of a murder?
What if the victim…:
SITUATION 1) …is confronted by a robber or other assailant
and suffers a heart attack and dies?
ANSWER: Do not count this as a murder, but simply as a
robbery or as an assault (because it is not a “willful
killing”).
SITUATION 2) …is a woman in the ninth month of pregnancy
who is stabbed in the stomach; she survives, but
the fetus dies?
ANSWER: Do not categorize this as a murder. Score this as
an aggravated assault against the woman
(because the definition of murder excludes
deaths of unborn fetuses).
SITUATION 3) …is a firefighter or a police officer who enters
a
burning building and dies; later it is determined
that the blaze was intentionally set by an
arsonist?
ANSWER: Do not count this as a murder because it is under-
stood that firefighting and police work is hazard-
ous and requires taking grave risks.
SITUATION 4) …is a motorist embroiled in a road rage
incident
who dies because his adversary intentionally
crashes his vehicle into the motorist’s car?
ANSWER: Score this as a murder. If the victim survives,

then consider the incident to be an aggravated
assault (the vehicle is the deadly weapon), no
matter how minor the injury to the person or the
damage to the car.
Part B. Is it a rape?
What if the victim…
SITUATION 1) …is slipped a date-rape drug in her drink by a
man who is after her, but he is unable to lure her
away from her friends?
ANSWER: Count this as an attempted forcible rape, since he
intended to have intercourse with her against
her will (she would be incapable of giving con-
sent because of her temporary mental or physical
incapacity) but was thwarted by his inability to
get her alone.
SITUATION 2) …is married to a man who beats her until she
submits to intercourse?
ANSWER: Count this as a forcible rape. Ever since marital
rape was recognized as a crime, the law no longer
permits a husband to be exempt from arrest for
forcing himself on his wife.
Part C. Is the incident an armed robbery?
What if the victim…
SITUATION 1) …is a cashier in a store who is ordered to hand
over money by a man who claims to have a
weapon in his pocket but does not brandish it,
so the cashier does not actually see it?
ANSWER: Score this as an armed robbery, since the robber

claimed to have a weapon (or perhaps had a fake
knife or gun).
SITUATION 2) …returns home and surprises a burglar, who
then assaults him with a crowbar, steals valu-
ables, and escapes out the door?
ANSWER: Score this as an armed robbery, since the resident
was confronted and attacked by the intruder.
SOURCE: Adapted and reworded from Uniform Crime
Reporting System Guidelines (FBI, 2009).
84 CH APT ER 3
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were discussed above may help explain some of the
inconsistent results in the years between 1973 and
the start of the 1990s, when the two trend lines
were not in synch. But one finding clearly emerges:
According to both of these monitoring systems,
violent crime rates “crashed” during the 1990s
and have continued to drift downward, as the
graph in Figure 3.2 demonstrates.
A parallel set of problems and findings arise
when the changes over time in property crime
rates are graphed. The UCR defines property
crime to include burglary, motor vehicle theft,
and larcenies against persons and households but
also against commercial enterprises, government
offices, and nonprofit entities. The NCVS counts
burglaries, vehicle thefts, and larcenies but only if
they are directed against individuals and their
households. Once again, despite differing signals
during the first 20 years, the takeaway message of
the graph in Figure 3.3 echoes that of Figure 3.2:
Property crime rates “crashed” during the 1990s
and have fallen farther during the twenty-first
century.
In sum, both the FBI’s UCR and the BJS’s
NCVS confirm that diminishing numbers of resi-

dents of the 50 states are being affected by the social
problems of violence and theft. In other words,
even though each year millions of new individuals
join the ranks of crime victims, the rate of growth
has been slowing down for about two decades. This
substantial decline in victimization rates since the
early 1990s is certainly good news. But how
much longer will this crime crash continue? Few
social scientists, politicians, or journalists would
dare declare that the “war on crime” has been
won. And since the experts can’t agree about the
reasons why this substantial improvement in public
safety took place, if someday there is a return to the
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
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a
te

(
p
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0
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0
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h
a
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a
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ts
)
Year
19
73
19
74
19

75
19
76
19
78
19
80
19
77
19
79
19
81
19
82
19
83
19
84
19
85
19
86
19

87
19
88
19
89
19
90
19
91
19
92
19
93
19
94
19
95
19
96
19
97
19
98
19

99
20
00
20
02
20
04
20
06
20
08
20
01
20
03
20
05
20
07
20
09
20
10
20

11
20
12
20
13
NCVS violent crime rate
UCR violent crime rate
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
N
C
V
S
R
a
te
(

p
e
r
1
,0
0
0
p
e
rs
o
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s)
F I G U R E 3.2 Trends in Violent Victimization Rates, United
States, 1973–2013
SOURCES: FBI’s UCRs 1973–2013; BJS’s NCVSs 1973–2013.
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“bad old days” of much higher rates of victimiza-
tion, the causes of this reversal will be the subject of
bitter debate (see Karmen, 2006).
TAKING A LONGER VIEW: MURDERS
IN THE UNITED STATES OVER THE
PAST CENTURY
Another aspect of the big picture involves getting a
feel for historical trends. Is the level of criminal
violence in the United States today far worse or
much better than in the distant past? Is the United
States becoming a safer place to live or a more dan-
gerous society as the decades pass by? Today’s crime
problem needs to be seen in a broader context.

Historians write about the carnage of the past,
especially when the first European settlers arrived,
and then during the time period of the Thirteen
Colonies, the American Revolution, the centuries
of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the
frontier days of the “Wild West.” But accurate
records are hard to find before industrialization
took place, cities sprang up, and urban police forces
began to guard local residents on a daily basis.
Graphs are particularly useful for spotting his-
torical trends at a glance. Trends in homicide rates
can be traced further back than changes over time
for the other interpersonal crimes.
Murder is the most terrible crime of all because it
inflicts the ultimate harm, and the damage cannot be
undone. The irreparable loss is also felt by the departed
person’s loved ones. But the social reaction to the
taking of a person’s life varies dramatically. It is deter-
mined by a number of factors: the state’s laws, the
offender’s state of mind, the deceased’s possible con-
tribution to the escalation of hostilities, the social
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000

6000
Year
19
73
19
74
19
75
19
76
19
78
19
80
19
77
19
79
19
81
19
82
19

83
19
84
19
85
19
86
19
87
19
88
19
89
19
90
19
91
19
92
19
93
19
94
19

95
19
96
19
97
19
98
19
99
20
00
20
02
20
04
20
06
20
08
20
01
20
03
20

05
20
07
20
09
20
10
20
11
20
12
20
13
NCVS property crime rate
UCR property crime rate
0
100
200
300
400
500

600
N
C
V
S
R
a
te
(
p
e
r
1
,0
0
0
p
e
rs
o
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s)
F I G U R E 3.3 Trends in Property Crime Rates, United States,
1973–2013
SOURCES: FBI’s UCRs 1973–2013; BJS’s NCVSs 1973–2013.

86 CH APT ER 3
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standing of each party, where the crime was commit-
ted, how the person was dispatched, and whether the
slaying attracted media coverage and public outcry.
Some murders make headlines, while others slip by
virtually unnoticed except by the next of kin. Some

killings lead to the execution of the perpetrator; others
ruled to be justifiable homicides result in no penalty
and possibly even widespread approval.
Homicide is broadly defined as the killing of one
human being by another. Not all homicides are pun-
ishable murders. All murders are socially defined:
How to handle a specific killing is determined by
legislators, police officers, and detectives; prosecutors
and defense attorneys; judges and juries; and even
the media and the public’s reaction to someone’s
demise. Deaths caused by carelessness and accidents
are not classified as murders (although if the damage
was foreseeable, they might be prosecuted as man-
slaughters). Acts involving the legitimate use of
deadly force in self-defense whether carried out
against felons by police officers or by private citizens
under attack (see Chapter 13) are also excluded from
the body counts, as are court-sanctioned executions.
The law takes into account whether a killing was
carried out intentionally (with “express malice”), in a
rational state of mind (“deliberate”), and with advance
planning (“premeditation”). These defining charac-
teristics of first-degree murders carry the most severe
punishments, including (depending on the state) exe-
cution or life imprisonment without parole. Killing
certain people—police officers, corrections officers,
judges, witnesses, and victims during rapes, kidnap-
pings, or robberies—may also be capital offenses.
A homicide committed with intent to inflict
grievous bodily injury (but no intent to kill) or
with extreme recklessness (“depraved heart”) is
prosecuted as a second-degree murder. A murder
in the second degree is not a capital crime and can-

not lead to the death penalty.
A homicide committed in the “sudden heat of
passion” as a result of the victim’s provocations is con-
sidered a “voluntary” (or first-degree) manslaughter.
The classic example is the “husband who comes home
to find his wife in bed with another man and kills
him.” Offenders convicted of manslaughter are pun-
ished less severely than those convicted of murder.
A loss of life due to gross negligence usually is
handled as an “involuntary” (second-degree) man-
slaughter, or it may not be subjected to criminal
prosecution at all. Involuntary manslaughter in
most states occurs when a person acts recklessly,
or appreciates the risk but does not use reasonable
care to perform a legal act, or commits an unlawful
act that is not a felony and yet a death results.
Some types of slayings have special names (see
Holmes, 1994): infanticide (of a newborn by a par-
ent), filicide (of a child by a parent or stepparent),
parricide (of a parent by a child), eldercide (of an
older person), intimate partner homicide (of a
spouse or lover), serial killing (several or more vic-
tims dispatched one at a time over an extended
period), mass murder (several people slaughtered
at the same time and place), felony murder (com-
mitted during another serious crime, like robbery,
kidnapping, or rape), and contract killing (a profes-
sional “hit” for an agreed-upon fee).
The UCR has been monitoring murder (com-
bined with manslaughter) rates since the beginning
of the 1930s, but in the beginning only big-city
police departments forwarded their records to FBI

headquarters. Fortunately, another source of data is
available that is drawn from death certificates
(maintained by coroner’s offices, which are called
medical examiners offices in some jurisdictions)
that list the cause of death. This database, compiled
by the National Center for Health Statistics, can be
tapped to reconstruct what happened during the
earliest years of the twentieth century up to the
present. Graphing this data facilitates the identifica-
tion of crime waves and spikes but also sharp drops
and deep “crashes” in the homicide rate over the
decades. Long-term trends can then be considered
in context (against a backdrop of major historical
events affecting the nation as a whole).
The Rise and Fall of Murder Rates Since 1900
It is possible to look back over more than a century
to note how the homicide rate has surged and ebbed
in America during various historical periods.
As the trend line in Figure 3.4 indicates, homi-
cide rates appeared to rise at the outset of the 1900s
authorization.
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as states’ coroners’ offices joined the statistical report-
ing system. From 1903 through the period of World
War I, which was followed by the prosperous
“Roaring Twenties” until the stock market “crash”
of 1929, the murder rate soared. It rose even further
for a few more years until it peaked in 1933. So
during the first 33 years of the twentieth century,
the homicide rate skyrocketed from less than 1
American killed out of every 100,000 each year to
nearly 10 per 100,000 annually.
The number of violent deaths plummeted after
Prohibition—the war on alcohol—ended in 1933,
even though the economic hardships of the Great
Depression persisted throughout the 1930s. During
the years of World War II, when many young men

were drafted to fight overseas against formidable
enemies trying to conquer the world, only 5 slayings
took place for every 100,000 inhabitants. A brief surge
in killings broke out as most of the soldiers returned
home from World War II, but then interpersonal
violence continued to decline during the 1950s,
reaching a low of about 4.5 slayings for every
100,000 people by 1958.
During the turbulent years from the early 1960s
to the middle 1970s, the number of deadly confron-
tations shot up, doubling the homicide rate. This
crime wave reflected the demographic impact of
the unusually large baby-boom generation passing
through its most crime-prone teenage and young-
adult years, as well as the bitter conflicts surrounding
the sweeping changes in everyday life brought about
by social protest movements that arose during the
1960s and lasted well into the 1970s. The level of
lethal violence during the twentieth century reached
its all-time high in 1980, when the homicide rate hit
10.2 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. After that peak,
murder rates dropped for several years until the
second half of the 1980s, when the crack epidemic
0
2
4
6
8

10
12
Year
H
o
m
ic
id
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p
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15
19
25
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35
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45
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55
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95
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50
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60
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10
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F I G U R E 3.4 An Historical Overview of Homicide Rates,
United States, 1900–2013
88 CH APT ER 3
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touched off another escalation of bloodshed. By the
start of the 1990s, murder rates once again were close
to their highest levels for the century. But as that
decade progressed, the fad of smoking crack, selling
drugs, and toting guns waned; the economy
improved; the proportion of the male population
between 18 and 24 years old dwindled; and conse-
quently, the murder rate tumbled (see Fox and
Zawitz, 2002; and Karmen, 2006). The death toll
has continued to drift downward throughout the
twenty-first century, even during the hard times of
the Great Recession that set in after the subprime
mortgage meltdown, stock market crash, and
corporate bailouts of 2008, as Figure 3.4 shows.
Returning to the UCR database, the impressive
improvement in public safety became strikingly
evident in 2013, when the body count declined
to about 14,200, about 10,500 fewer victims than
in 1991, when the death toll had reached an
all-time record of close to 24,700. Taking popula-
tion growth into account, the U.S. murder rate in
2013 stood at 4.5 killings per 100,000 inhabitants,
an overall “crash” of about 50 percent since 1991
(Cooper and Smith, 2011). The U.S. murder rate
hadn’t been as low as 4.5 since 1958.
PUTTING CRIME INTO PERSPECTIVE:
THE CHANCES OF DYING
VIOLENTLY—OR FROM OTHER
CAUSES
One final way to grasp the big picture involves

weighing the relative threats posed by different types
of misfortunes. The chance of being harmed by a
criminal needs to be compared to the odds of being
hurt in an accident or of contracting a serious illness.
The study of comparative risks rests on estimates
of the likelihood of experiencing various negative
life events. One purpose of studying comparative
risks is to determine what kinds of threats (crimes,
accidents, or diseases) merit greater precautionary
measures by both individuals and government-
sponsored campaigns. (A list of calamities could
be expanded to include plagues, fires, and natural
disasters such as floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and
hurricanes.) Once the chances of being stricken by
dreaded events are expressed in a standardized way,
such as rates per 100,000 people, the dangers can be
compared or ranked, as they are in Table 3.2. The
data is derived from death certificates filed in all 50
states and the District of Columbia. It is collated by
the National Center for Health Statistics into a
National Vital Statistics System (Xu et al., 2014).
The nationwide data assembled in the first column
of Table 3.2 pertains to people of all ages, both sexes,
and varying backgrounds. The statistics in column 2
indicate that overall, about 800 out of every 100,000
Americans died in 2010. That year, the number of
deaths from natural causes (diseases) greatly exceeded
losses of life from external causes (accidents, suicides,
and homicides). In particular, heart disease, cancer, and
stroke were by far the leading causes of death in
the United States at the end of the first decade of
the twenty-first century. As for other untimely
demises, more people died from accidents (including
car crashes) than from homicide (murders plus deaths

by “legal intervention”—justifiable homicides by
police officers as well as executions of death row
prisoners). In fact, more people took their own lives
through suicides than lost them due to violence
unleashed by others (homicide was added to the
bottom of the list and did not rank in the top 10 leading
causes of death). Tentatively, it can be concluded that
most people worry too much about being murdered
and ought to focus more of their energies toward their
health, eating habits, and lifestyles instead.
However, this inspection of comparative risks
surely doesn’t seem right to some readers. For exam-
ple, dying from Alzheimer’s disease might be a very
real and scary prospect to aging baby boomers, but it is
off the radar screen for most millennials. The useful-
ness of comparing the mortality rates assembled in the
second column of Table 3.2 to each other is limited.
The reason is simple: The data in the second column
of the table ignores the key factor of age. Column 2’s
figures about the causes of death describe the dangers
faced by the “average” American, a social construct
that each person resembles to some extent. But the
actual odds a specific individual faces may differ
tremendously from this fictitious composite norm.
authorization.
F
O

S
T
E
R
,
C
E
D
R
I
C
1
6
9
2
T
S
Besides age, the most important determinants
of mortality rates are sex, race/ethnicity, social
class, and place of residence. To make more mean-
ingful comparisons, some of these key variables,
especially age, must be controlled, or held constant
(see Fingerhut, Ingram, and Feldman, 1992). Death
rates for young adults appear in the third column of
Table 3.2.
Comparing the rates in column 3 to those in
column 2 reveals some sharp differences. For exam-
ple, of all Americans between the ages of 20 and 24
(of both sexes and all races), only 87, not 800, out
of every 100,000 died in 2010. For people in their

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