FBI’s Uniform Crime Report: Often Misunderstood and Frequently Abused

3/26/2014

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Every year the Federal Bureau of Investigation releases its Crime in the United States and the data it contains is employed in ways the FBI explicitly warns against.

The FBI publication Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics: Their Proper Use (click here to view) explicitly states: “the FBI cautions and, in fact, strongly discourages, data users against using rankings to evaluate locales.”

Repackaging the FBI’s UCR data – as many companies attempting to make predictions of criminal activity do – is neither innovative, predictive, nor accurate.

In its own UCR documentation, the FBI explains, “valid assessments are possible only with careful study and analysis of the various unique conditions affecting each local law enforcement jurisdiction.”

The FBI then proceeds to list more than a dozen examples of the kind of community and demographic data that contribute to accurate predictions.

The FBI list is, not surprisingly, strikingly similar to the precise kinds of demographic data that CAP Index has used from its earliest days when it pioneered and helped define crime risk assessment over 25 years ago.

CAP Index has never used UCR data to build its renowned risk prediction models. Its scores are created and tested using millions of actual crime and loss experiences reported at specific sites across industry groups and geographic areas.

Of course, the best way to test the validity and value of any given set of predictions is to measure their accuracy. Only CAP Index has decades of proven accuracy – no other company has a comparable record to back up either its process or its predictive power.