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Home • Crime in the U.S. • 2015 • Crime in the U.S. 2015 • Tables • Table 59 • Table 59 Data Declaration

Table 59 Data Declaration

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Arrests, Nonmetropolitan Counties, Persons Under 15, 18, 21, and 25 Years of Age, 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.

The rape figures in this table are aggregate totals of the data submitted based on both the legacy and revised UCR definitions.

General comments

  • This table provides the number of persons arrested in nonmetropolitan counties in 2015 and, of those persons, the number arrested within the following age groups: Under 15, Under 18, Under 21, and Under 25. In addition, the table shows the percentage that each age group comprises of the total number of persons arrested for each offense. 
  • The Nonmetropolitan Counties classification encompasses jurisdictions covered by noncity law enforcement agencies located outside currently designated Metropolitan Statistical Areas. (See Area Definitions.)
  • These data represent the number of persons arrested; however, some persons may be arrested more than once during a year. Therefore, the statistics in this table could, in some cases, represent multiple arrests of the same person.

Methodology

The data used in creating this table were from all nonmetropolitan county law enforcement agencies submitting 12 months of arrest data for 2015.

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.