Classroomtools.com Warm-up Activity - Interesting Numbers - What Is the Most Common Crime Committed in the U.S.?

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What is the most common crime committed in the U.S.?

According to the FBI's Crime in the United States 2003, the most common violent crime was aggravated assault (one was reported on average every 36.8 seconds); while the most common property crime was larceny (one was reported on average every 4.5 seconds). The FBI announced these statistics in a press release on October 25, 2004. Reports for previous and subsequent years can be found at the Uniform Crime Reports page.

Here are the numbers reported by the FBI for 2003, shown from least to most frequent.

	Number reported	% of total	in 2003, 1 was reported on average in the U.S. every
Violent crimes (total)	1,381,259	11.7%	22.8 seconds
Murder	16,503	0.1%	31.8 minutes
Forcible rape	93,433	0.8%	5.6 minutes
Robbery	413,402	3.5%	1.3 minutes
Aggravated assault	857,921	7.3%	36.8 seconds
Property crimes (total)	10,435,523	88.3%	3 seconds
Motor vehicle theft	1,260,471	10.7%	25 seconds
Burglary	2,153,464	18.2%	14.6 seconds
Larceny-theft	7,021,588	59.4%	4.5 seconds

If your students are like mine, they'll most likely select robbery or murder. The last time I asked this question, murder came in first with robbery a strong second. (Rather than try for a group consensus, I'd simply totaled the number of votes each type of crime got.) I don't think we have to look very far to find the reason for this discrepancy between perception and reality. If we counted crimes committed or reported on TV or in the movies, no doubt we'd find that murders and robbery lead the pack. Most of us have very little experience with true crime, but we all have regular experience with mediated crime. Look at the news or prime time programming any night of the week - murders and robberies galore. All of this mediated crime has very real effects. It surfaces in our fears and in our reported perceptions of the world. The crime rate fell each year from 1992 through 2000, but people's fear of crime did not decrease. Why not? I submit that while real crime rates fell, mediated crime increased. And even though we say we know the difference, our fears show that on a gut level we really don't.
To explore a related misperception fostered by media, look at When a person dies at the hands of a gunman, who most often pulls the trigger?
For a critique of the media's emphasis on violence, take a look at The Freedom Forum Online's article Media's prime-time crime spree hides real statistics — violence in U.S. is down.
A study of local TV news in Los Angeles conducted by researchers at the UCLA School of Public Health was released on November 30, 2001, and published in the Western Journal of Medicine. It clearly showed that mayhem and violence are blown out of all proportion on local TV news broadcasts.
The effects of the media's emphasis on violent crime is reflected in Gallup's annual Crime Poll. The public thinks there is more crime than last year.
It is also important to note that both national measures of crime in the U.S., the UCR (above) and the NCVS (below), exclude many common types of crime - most notably "white collar crime". Both primarily track so-called "blue collar crime", those crimes involving force and engendering fear. Since the estimates of the annual cost of "white collar crime" range from $300 billion to $660 billion, they are not insignificant. Other crimes not tracked by these measures include the so-called "victimless crimes" like prostitution, and illegal drug use and possession.

In another example that shows why teaching process is more important than teaching answers, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) produces yearly statistics on crime in the U.S. too. However, the ones they produce are based on interviews with victims conducted as part of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), rather than reports from police agencies. Consequently, murders are not reported since there are no living victims to interview. Most of the other categories, though, show much larger numbers than do the FBI reports. From this, one can conclude that there is a great deal of unreported crime in the U.S. On the other hand, while the BJS numbers show much more crime, the relative magnitude of the various crime categories remains the same. Two statisticians from the Bureau of Justice Statistics discussed the data differences in this article.

Here are the numbers reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2003, shown from least to most frequent. I've used the FBI frequency calculation method to prepare the right-hand column of this table in order to make the two tables as comparable as possible.

	Number reported	% of total	in 2003, 1 occurred on average in the U.S. every
Violent crimes (total)	1,896,090	9.3%	16.6 seconds
Murder
Forcible rape	198,850	1.7%	2.6 minutes
Robbery	596,130	5.0%	52.9 seconds
Aggravated assault	1,101,110	9.3%	28.6 seconds
Property crimes (total)	18,582,670	90.7%	1.7 seconds
Motor vehicle theft	988,760	4.8%	31.9 seconds
Burglary	3,395,620	16.6%	9.3 seconds
Larceny-theft	14,198,290	69.3%	2.2 seconds

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