Data regarding crime and solve rates come from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. Counts of reported violent crime between 2013 and 2023 are derived from the Summary Reporting System (SRS) and the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The FBI generated national estimates for reported crime and clearances based on agency-level reports, and these estimates were published through 2023 in the FBI’s annual report, Crime in the U.S. and on the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer. For agency-level clearance data, we used Jacob Kaplan’s version of the Offenses Known and Clearances by Arrest dataset.
The FBI stopped SRS data collection after data year 2020 and required law enforcement agencies to use NIBRS to report crime statistics to the FBI. This change decreased the number of agencies that submitted their crime data and thus reduced the reliability of state estimates in 2021. In 2022 and 2023, the FBI allowed agencies who were unable to submit NIBRS data to submit SRS data again. Ninety-four percent of the U.S. population was covered in the 2023 crime data submissions to the FBI, with most states providing close to complete data. However, the population upon which the estimates were derived decreased by over 10 percent in three states: Florida, Mississippi, and Wyoming, so conclusions about crime changes in those states should be interpreted with additional caution.
Crime rates are calculated by dividing the number of estimated incidents by the total U.S. population. Population data come from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 1-year estimates (table B01003) and the 2020 Decennial Census Redistricting Data (table P1).
Solve rates are the number of reported crimes cleared by arrest or by exceptional means divided by the number of reported crimes. A reported crime incident is cleared by exceptional means if a law enforcement agency is unable to arrest or formally charge a person with a crime, but the agency has met the following conditions:
- Identified the person who committed the crime
- Gathered enough evidence to support an arrest, make a charge, and turn over the person to the court for prosecution
- Identified the suspect’s exact location so that the person could be taken into custody immediately
- Encountered a circumstance outside the control of law enforcement that prohibits the agency from arresting, charging, and prosecuting the person
Examples of exceptional clearances include the death of the person who committed the crime; the victim’s refusal to cooperate with the prosecution after the person who committed the crime has been identified; or the denial of extradition.
In some instances, the solve rate and number of solved crimes may be less than 0. This is due to the fact that the number of reported crimes cleared in a year can include incidents reported in prior years. For this reason, it is possible to have more cleared crimes than new reported incidents in a given year.
Agency- and county-level violent crime and solve rate data presented above are restricted to agencies reporting data for all 12 months in 2023. The calculation of population covered by reporting agencies, as well as the number of reporting agencies by county, is also based on agencies with violent crime data for all 12 months.
Each law enforcement agency is grouped by the county where they are based using the Law Enforcement Agency Identifiers Crosswalk developed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2012. The overall county population used for calculation of county-level rates is based on the sum of the jurisdiction populations for agencies reporting data for all 12 months in 2023.
Counties with fewer than 25 reported violent incidents in 2023 are excluded from the map, as calculations of solve rates are not reliable.
