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Percent of Offenses Cleared by Arrest or Exceptional Means, by Region and Geographic Division, 2014

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

Important note about rape data

In 2013, the FBI UCR Program initiated the collection of rape data under a revised definition and removed the term “forcible” from the offense name. The UCR Program now defines rape as follows:

Rape (revised definition): Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim. (This includes the offenses of rape, sodomy, and sexual assault with an object as converted from data submitted via the National Incident-Based Reporting System.)

Rape (legacy definition): The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.

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 by region and geographic division.

• This table furnishes national clearance data and clearances broken down for the nation’s four regions and nine geographic divisions.

• The number of agencies meeting the criteria for inclusion in this table and the 2014 estimated population for those agencies are provided by region and geographic division.

• Not all agencies submit data reports for arson to the FBI. Therefore, the agency counts and estimated population presented in this table do not represent participation for the reporting of arson.

Methodology

• The data used in creating this table were from all law enforcement agencies submitting at least 6 months of complete offense reports for 2014.

• 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.

Regions and geographic divisions

The U.S. Census Bureau has established the four regions of the United States along with nine geographic divisions that the UCR Program uses to compile the nation’s crime data. The following table lists the 50 states and the District of Columbia arranged according to the regions and geographic divisions of the United States.

NORTHEASTERN REGION

New England

Connecticut

Maine

Massachusetts

New Hampshire

Rhode Island

Vermont

Middle Atlantic

New Jersey

New York

Pennsylvania

MIDWESTERN REGION

East North Central

Illinois

Indiana

Michigan

Ohio

Wisconsin

West North Central

Iowa

Kansas

Minnesota

Missouri

Nebraska

North Dakota

South Dakota

SOUTHERN REGION

South Atlantic

Delaware

District of Columbia

Florida

Georgia

Maryland

North Carolina

South Carolina

Virginia

West Virginia

East South Central

Alabama

Kentucky

Mississippi

Tennessee

West South Central

Arkansas

Louisiana

Oklahoma

Texas

WESTERN REGION

Mountain

Arizona

Colorado

Idaho

Montana

Nevada

New Mexico

Utah

Wyoming

Pacific

Alaska

California

Hawaii

Oregon

Washington

Population estimation

For the 2014 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 2010 decennial population counts and 2011 through 2013 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 2013 Census population estimate to derive the agency’s 2014 population estimate.