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Home • Crime in the U.S. • 2016 • Crime in the U.S. 2016 • Tables • Table 20 • Table 20 Data Declaration

Table 20 Data Declaration

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Arrests, by Age, 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 nationwide in 2016. These data are broken down by age of the arrestee and include the percent distribution of arrests by offense type. 
  • 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.

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.