Supplementary

Estimated Number of Arrests, United States, 2012

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

General comments

This table provides the estimated number of persons arrested in the United States in 2012.

Methodology

The data used in creating the national estimates for this table were from all law enforcement agencies submitting 12 months of arrest data for 2012.

Arrest estimation

• The arrest totals presented are national estimates based on the arrest rate arrest statistics of all law enforcement agencies submitting a complete year 12 months of arrest data to the UCR Program.

• The total estimated number of arrests in this table is the sum of estimated arrest volumes for 27 offenses, excluding suspicion.

• The arrest data for each of the individual offenses in this table is the sum of the estimated volume for that offense within each of the eight population groups. (See Area Definitions.)

• The FBI calculated each of the eight population group’s arrest estimates by dividing the reported 12-month volume figures (as shown in Table 31) by the contributing agencies’ jurisdictional populations. The resulting figure was then multiplied by the total population for each population group as estimated by the UCR Program. The FBI calculated arrest rates using data from all law enforcement agencies submitting a complete year of arrest data (i.e., complete reporters), then multiplying this complete-response arrest rate by the total population (including those of incomplete and non-reporters) in each arrest offense and population group and then multiplying by 100,000 for each arrest offense.

Arrest data is not imputed and then aggregated to the national level. The FBI UCR Program does not impute missing Arrest data from either nonreporting or partially reporting jurisdictions. Published estimates are based only on data from those jurisdictions submitting 12 months of arrest data because the arrests from partial and incomplete reporting agencies are excluded from the rate calculation.