FBI Releases 2017 Crime Data
The FBI released information on more than 6 million criminal offenses submitted to its new National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) last year. National law enforcement agencies are continuing to transition to the more informative crime reporting system, which will become the national standard for crime reporting in 2021, an FBI release says.
In 2017, 6,998 law enforcement agencies reported data to NIBRS. In an introductory message last year FBI Director Christopher Wray said of NIBRS: “We want to have greater transparency and accountability in policing. One way to get there is by improving the data. That data will give us a more complete picture of what’s really going on in our communities and allow us to do what we need to do to keep people safe.”
Data from 2017 included information on around 5.4 million incidents with 6,290,042 criminal offense, of which 61 percent were crimes against property, 23 percent were crimes against persons, and 16 percent were crimes against society (such as animal cruelty).
Of the 4,524,968 individuals who were victims of crimes, 23.4 percent were between 21 and 30 years old, a little more than half were female, and 48 percent were male. More than half (52.2 percent) of victims knew their offenders but were not related to them. Nearly a quarter of crime victims were related to the offender.
Regarding the offenders, data showed there were 5,266,175 known offenders (meaning at least one characteristic of the person is known, such as age, gender or race), and 41.9 percent of known offenders were between the ages of 16 and 30. More than 60 percent of known criminals were men, and 25.5 percent were women.
Learn more about the NIBRS data here in an interactive map here.
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