A Note About The FBI UCR Statistics
There
is one thing that many people do not take into account when they
publish statistics from the FBI regarding rape - the simple fact that
the numbers that are estimated for a particular year are just that,
estimates. If you look at the FBI data from year to year, you will
always find that the previous year's data has a finalized number that is
actually higher than the original published estimate.
Oftentimes many organizations will grab just the
preliminary number (the estimate), when the actual number in the end
is always significantly greater. The only time this did not
happen was in 2000, when the number actually became smaller.
In the statistics at left, this fluctuation has
been accounted for from 1994 through 2003. For those years it was easy
to get the adjusted number, so the numbers presented at left from
94-03 are accurate final numbers.
For some reason, the FBI has made it more
difficult to find the adjusted finalized numbers from 2004 through
2016. The numbers at left for those years are the estimated numbers.
This website will make every effort to get the
finalized numbers published as soon as they become available.
FBI NOTE
In 2013, the FBI’s UCR Program initiated the
collection of rape data under a revised definition within the Summary
Based Reporting System.
The term “forcible” was removed from the offense
name, and the definition was changed to “penetration, no matter how
slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral
penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of
the victim.”
In 2016, the FBI Director approved the
recommendation to discontinue the reporting of rape data using the UCR
legacy definition beginning in 2017.
Therefore, the rape data reported
by those agencies using the UCR legacy definition are not included in
this Report.
More information about this subject is presented
in footnotes and data declarations for each table.
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