- Reported crime
- Rate per 100,000
- Reporting coverage
- Violent crime
- Property crime
- UCR and NIBRS
- ORI (Originating Agency Identifier)
- Clearance
- Language we avoid
- Reported crime
- An offense that was reported to a police agency and then submitted by that agency to the FBI. Crimes never reported to police, and agencies that did not submit data, are not counted. A change in the number can reflect reporting as much as crime itself.
- Rate per 100,000
- The number of reported offenses divided by the area's population, then multiplied by 100,000. Expressing crime as a rate lets places of very different sizes be compared.
- Reporting coverage
- The share of an area's population covered by law-enforcement agencies that actually submitted data for the year. Shown on every page. Where coverage is low, the rate is unreliable, and two places with very different coverage should not be compared directly.
- Violent crime
- The FBI's violent-crime category: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. It counts incidents reported to police, not convictions.
- Property crime
- Burglary, larceny-theft and motor vehicle theft. Arson is tracked separately. Property crime is far more common than violent crime almost everywhere.
- UCR and NIBRS
- The Uniform Crime Reporting program is the FBI's long-running national crime data system. NIBRS (the National Incident-Based Reporting System) is its more detailed successor. The 2021 transition to NIBRS caused a temporary drop in reporting coverage.
- ORI (Originating Agency Identifier)
- The code the FBI assigns to each law-enforcement agency. The FBI reports by agency, not by city — and one city can be served by several agencies — which is why city-level figures require careful matching and are not in this edition.
- Clearance
- An offense is "cleared" when police make an arrest or close it by exceptional means. A clearance rate is not the same as a conviction rate and is not shown as a safety measure here.
- Language we avoid
- CrimeAtlasUSA never describes a place as "safe" or "dangerous" and does not publish "most dangerous" rankings. Statements take the form: the reported rate was X per 100,000 in a given year, based on data from Y of Z agencies.
More on sources and the limits of this data on the About the Data page and the FAQ.