Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook

Uniform crime reporting is a collective effort on the part of city, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies to present a nationwide view of crime. Agencies throughout the country participating in the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program provide summarized reports on eight Part I offenses known to law enforcement and reports on persons arrested. They also provide information about law enforcement officers killed and assaulted and on hate crime. For the most part, agencies submit crime reports monthly to a centralized crime records facility within their state. The state UCR Program then forwards the data, using uniform offense definitions, to the FBI’s national UCR Program. Agencies in states that do not have a state Program submit their statistics directly to the national Program. The FBI provides report forms, tally sheets, tally books, and self-addressed envelopes to these direct contributors (local agencies that do not have the benefit of a state Program). The FBI compiles, publishes, and distributes the data to participating agencies, state UCR Programs, and others interested in the Nation’s crime data.