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Percent of Offenses Cleared by Arrest or Exceptional Means, Additional Information About Selected Offenses by Population Group, 2015

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

Important note about rape data

In 2013, the 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 offense breakdowns and the percentages of those crimes that were cleared by arrest or exceptional means for the following offenses: 
• Rape (by force and assault to rape-attempts) 
• Robbery and aggravated assault (weapon used) 
• Burglary (forcible entry, unlawful entry, and attempted forcible entry) 
• Motor vehicle theft (vehicle type) 
• Arson (property type) 

• Agencies must report clearances for specific offense breakdowns on either the Return A or the Monthly Return of Arson Offenses Known to Law Enforcement to be included in this table. However, not all agencies submit these supplemental data to the FBI; therefore, clearance data in this table may differ from those in other clearance tables. 

• The number of agencies meeting the criteria for inclusion in this table and the 2015 estimated population for those agencies are provided by city population groups, county population groups, and suburban areas. 

• 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 2015. 

• 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:

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

²Includes state police to which no population is attributed.

Population estimation 

For the 2015 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 2014 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 2014 Census population estimate to derive the agency’s 2015 population estimate.