Recognizing the need for national crime statistics, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) developed the foundations in the 1920s for the current UCR program.

In June 1930, Congress designated the FBI as the agency authorized to collect, compile, and distribute crime records in an effort to measure the volume of crime in the United States. The UCR program collects monthly information from more than 18,000 city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies that voluntarily reporting data on crimes reported to them.

The primary objective of the UCR program is to produce reliable data on crime for use in law enforcement administration, operation, and management. UCR data are not intended to be used to rank agencies or the jurisdictions in which they are located, and thus UCR data should not be used to designate American cities, counties, or other jurisdictions as "safe" or "dangerous" in the absence of careful consideration of the limitations of these data.

The UCR records data for eight serious crimes (called Part I offenses) and more than twenty less serious offenses (called Part II offenses). Part I offenses include four violent crimes —murder and nonnegligent manslaughter (homicide), forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault —and four property crimes —burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson.

The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer provides public access to UCR data.

UCR in Alaska

Since 1982, the Alaska Department of Public Safety (DPS) has administered the UCR program for Alaska. DPS collects, tabulates, reports, and publishes UCR data submitted by Alaska law enforcement agencies. As is the case nationally, submitting agencies retain responsibility for the accuracy of the data submitted. While UCR reporting to the FBI is voluntary, AS §12.62.130 requires Alaska law enforcement agencies to submit crime data to DPS.

Crime in Alaska, DPS’s publication presenting UCR data tables for the state as a whole, as well as submitting agencies, is available on the DPS UCR Archive web page. As a community service, the Alaska Justice Information Center (AJiC) has converted hard copies of Alaska's uniform crime report publications from 1976-1999 into the searchable PDF documents available in our AJiC ScholarWorks UCR Archive.