Nathan James and Rishard Logan. Congressional Research Service, January 3, 2008.
"Crime data collected through the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) are used by Congress to inform policy decisions and allocate federal criminal justice funding to states...This report reviews (1) the history of the UCR, the NIBRS, and the NCVS; (2) the methods each program uses to collect crime data; and (3) the limitations of the data collected by each program."
Uniform Crime Reports
The The Uniform Crime Reporting Program includes data from more than 18,000 city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies.
The UCR Program consists of four data collections: The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), the Summary Reporting System (SRS), the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) Program, and the Hate Crime Statistics Program.
The FBI's Crime Data Explorer contains the most recent UCR data, with older data being transitioned over time. Some data is available back to 1986.
The UCR Publications site has links to historical (up to 2019) UCR publications, including Crime in the United States, NIBRS, LEOKA, and Hate Crime Statistics reports, as well as topical reports on cargo theft, human trafficking, federal crime data, and more.
The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is the primary source of information on criminal victimization. Data are collected annually from a nationally representative sample of about 240,000 persons in about 150,000 households. The NCVS collects information on nonfatal personal crimes (i.e., rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated and simple assault, and personal larceny) and household property crimes (i.e., burglary/trespassing, motor vehicle theft, and other types of theft) both reported and not reported to the police. Demographic information on the respondents is collected as well.
N-DASH provides estimates from the NCVS as interactive data visualizations, providing a variety of views and analysis types to investigate questions of interest. On the Quick Graphics and Custom Graphics pages, you can view or create and download charts and tables. Data is available back to 1993.
Shannan M. Catalano. New York, LFB Scholarly Pub., 2006.
"This study uses data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for the years 1973-2002 to examine the convergence between victim reporting and police recording of serious violent crime." Rutgers-restricted Access