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Percent of Offenses Cleared by Arrest or Exceptional Means, by Population Group, 2016

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 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 2016 estimated population for those agencies are provided by city population groups, county population groups, and suburban areas. 

• 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.

• 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 2016. 

• 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	25,000 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 2016 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 2015 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 2015 Census population estimate to derive the agency’s 2016 population estimate.