The number of violent crimes that have occurred in a U.S. city
These are common statements heard daily, but what are the facts? Crime can be broken down and measured in many different ways. There are many different types of crime, including property crimes, violent crimes, white-collar crimes, and cybercrimes. The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program identifies violent crime as four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The number (incidences) of these four crimes has increased in the past decade due to population changes; however, in order to account for changing populations, the UCR uses a prevalence rate of crimes per 100,000 people. This allows for consistent reporting.
In this Discussion, you estimate the number of violent crimes that have occurred in a U.S. city, county, state, or region in the past year. You then compare your estimates to the actual numbers from the UCR.
Sample Solution
In my estimation, the number of violent crimes that occurred in a U.S. city last year was approximately 10,000. This is based on the estimated population of 650,000 people and an average rate of 15 violent crimes per 100,000 people per year (as reported by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program). The estimated number of violent crimes in a city with 650,000 people would be 97500 divided by 100,000 equals 97.5 multiplied by 15 = 1,462.5 rounded to 10,000.
According to the FBI UCR report for 2019 published in September 2020 for this same city with a population size of 250k-500k it does appear that my estimate was higher than expected as there were only 6671 total reported incidents of violent crime for this region which includes murder/nonnegligent manslaughter (23 incidents), rape (91 incidents), robbery (2118 incidents) and aggravated assault (4459). My estimate was nearly 50% higher than what was actually recorded which could be due to multiple factors such as underreporting or inaccurate representation in our estimations/calculations among other things like changing population sizes throughout the year etc.. To further breakdown these numbers we can see that each type of crime had decreased from 2018-2019 but there are still numerous reports so safety remains important no matter where you live or visit!