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Home Crime in the U.S. 2016 Crime in the U.S. 2016 Tables Table 19 Table 19 Data Declaration

Table 19 Data Declaration

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Number and Rate of Arrests by Region, 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.

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 and the arrest rate per 100,000 inhabitants for the four regions of the United States, and also for the nation, in 2016. 
  • 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 law enforcement agencies submitting 12 months of arrest data for 2016. 
  • The FBI derived the arrest rates by first dividing the total number of arrests by the aggregated populations covered by contributing agencies and then multiplying the resulting figure by 100,000. 

Regions and divisions

The U.S. Census Bureau has established the four regions of the United States along with their nine geographic divisions which are used by the UCR Program when compiling the Nation’s crime data. The following table lists the 50 states and the District of Columbia arranged according to the regions and divisions of the United States.

NORTHEASTERN STATES

New England 
Connecticut 
Maine 
Massachusetts 
New Hampshire 
Rhode Island 
Vermont 

Middle Atlantic 
New Jersey 
New York 
Pennsylvania 

MIDWESTERN STATES 

East North Central 
Illinois 
Indiana 
Michigan 
Ohio 
Wisconsin 

West North Central 
Iowa 
Kansas 
Minnesota 
Missouri 
Nebraska 
North Dakota 
South Dakota 

SOUTHERN STATES 

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 STATES 

Mountain 
Arizona 
Colorado 
Idaho 
Montana 
Nevada 
New Mexico 
Utah 
Wyoming 

Pacific 
Alaska 
California 
Hawaii 
Oregon 
Washington

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.