How to Compare Crime Rates
Comparing crime rates between U.S. cities is not as difficult as it may seem. The FBI compiles crime data from 17,000 law enforcement agencies from across the U.S. into a yearly uniform crime report. Ten types of crimes are reported, including murder, rape, burglary and theft. Hate crimes are also reported, but these are included in a separate hate crimes statistics report. All of this data can be found on the FBI's website.
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Instructions
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Go directly to the Uniform Crime Report section of the FBI website. The web address is http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm.
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Scroll down until you see the section titled Crime in the United States. Continue to scroll if interested in the Hate Crimes Statistics section.
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Click on the year that you are interested in acquiring data for.
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Read Caution Against Ranking and then click on the link below it titled Continue to Crime in the United States.
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Click on either Violent Crime or Property Crime, depending on what it is that you are looking for.
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Click on your preference. The available options here are to browse by offense or by the sub categories of National, Regional, States, Municipalities and even colleges and universities.
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Assuming that you are interested in data for a specific city, you will click on City Agency.
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Click on the link for the data table.
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Click on the state that the city you are searching for is located in.
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Scroll down to the city you are interested in. The cities are listed in alphabetical order and the pertinent data follows immediately after the municipality's name. You can also download this table as an Excel spreadsheet for future reference.
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Print this data out, or write the pertinent figures down.
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Go back to step 7 if you are going to compare the data for two cities in the same year, or go back to step 3 if you are comparing the data for the same city over multiple years.
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Proceed as before until you have reached the pertinent data.
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Print this data out, or copy the figures down.
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Compare the two sets of crime data.
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