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Percent of Offenses Cleared by Arrest or Exceptional Means, Additional Information About Selected Offenses by Population Group, 2017

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

Important note about rape data

In 2013, the FBI’s UCR Program initiated the collection of rape data under a revised definition within the Summary Based Reporting System. The term “forcible” was removed from the offense name, and the definition was changed to “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.”

In 2016, the FBI Director approved the recommendation to discontinue the reporting of rape data using the UCR legacy definition beginning in 2017. Therefore, the rape data reported by those agencies using the UCR legacy definition are not included in this table.

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 2017 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 2017.

• The FBI bases percent cleared statistics on aggregated offense and clearance totals. The percentage of crimes cleared by arrest is obtained by dividing the number of offenses cleared by the number of offenses known and then multiplying the resulting figure by 100.

• The rape figures are based only on those agencies reporting rape using the revised definition. See table below.

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 2017 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 2016 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 2016 Census population estimate to derive the agency’s 2017 population estimate.