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Home • Crime in the U.S. • 2010 • Crime in the U.S. 2010 • Data Decs • Table 25 Data Declaration

Table 25 Data Declaration

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Percent of Offenses Cleared by Arrest or Exceptional Means, by Population Group, 2010

The FBI collects these data through the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program.

General comments

  • This table provides the number of violent crimes and property crimes with a breakdown of the offenses known to law enforcement and the percentage of those offenses that were cleared by arrest or exceptional means. 
  • The number of agencies meeting the criteria for inclusion in this table and the 2010 estimated population for those agencies are provided by city population groups, county population groups, and suburban areas. 
  • Not all agencies submit reports for arson to the FBI. As a result, the number of reports the FBI uses to compute the percent of offenses cleared for arson is less than the number it uses to compute the percent of offenses cleared for all other offenses. 
  • Suburban areas include law enforcement agencies in cities with less than 50,000 inhabitants and county law enforcement agencies that are within a Metropolitan Statistical Area. 
  • Suburban areas exclude all metropolitan agencies associated with a principal city. The agencies associated with suburban areas also appear in other groups within this table. 

Methodology

  • The data used in creating this table were from all law enforcement agencies submitting at least 6 months of complete offense reports for 2010. 
  • The FBI bases percent cleared statistics on aggregated offense and clearance totals. The percentage of crimes cleared by arrest is obtained first by dividing the number of offenses cleared by the number of offenses known and then multiplying the resulting figure by 100. 

Population groups

The UCR Program uses the following population group designations:

Population Group Political Label Population Range
I City 250,000 and more
II City 100,000 to 249,999
III City 50,000 to 99,999
IV City 29,000 to 49,999
V City 10,000 to 24,999
VI1,2 City Less than 10,000
VIII (Nonmetropolitan County)2 County N/A
IX (Metropolitan County)2 County N/A

1Includes universities and colleges to which no population is attributed. 

2Includes state police to which no population is attributed. 

Population estimation

For the 2010 population estimates used in this table, the FBI computed individual rates of growth from one year to the next for every city/town and county using 2000 decennial population counts and 2001 through 2009 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Each agency’s rates of growth were averaged; that average was then applied and added to its 2009 Census population estimate to derive the agency’s 2010 population estimate.