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Number of Offenses Cleared by Arrest or Exceptional Means, Percent of Clearances Involving Persons Under 18 Years of Age by Population Group, 2019

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 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 the number of clearances for violent crimes and property crimes with a breakdown of clearances for those offenses as well as the percentage of those clearances that involved only juveniles.
• The number of agencies meeting the criteria for inclusion in this table and the 2019 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.
• When an offender under the age of 18 is cited to appear in juvenile court or before other juvenile authorities, the UCR Program considers the incident to be cleared by arrest, even though a physical arrest may not have occurred.
• Clearances for offenses that include both adult and juvenile offenders are classified as clearances for crimes committed by adults and are, therefore, not included in this table.
• Because the clearance percentages for crimes committed by juveniles include only those clearances in which no adults were involved, the figures in this table should not be used to present a definitive picture of juvenile involvement in crime.

• The data used in creating this table were from all law enforcement agencies submitting at least 6 months of complete offense reports for 2019.
• 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 estimation

For the 2019 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 2018 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 2018 Census population estimate to derive the agency’s 2019 population estimate.