![]() ![]() Throughout 2020, law enforcement agencies continued to collect data on crimes known to and recorded by the police, and to forward these to the FBI. The Federal Bureau of Investigation posted the 2020 statistics from the Uniform Crime Reporting System in September, 2021. Police Statistics from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports Other authors (see the article by Pew Research and other articles listed in the references) have provided comprehensive discussions of changes in homicide rates for 2020 here, I focus on violent crimes other than homicide. I discuss the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic * on the data collection and the interpretation of statistics, not the effect on the amount of crime. In this column, let’s look at some of the “footnotes” for interpreting 2020 crime statistics from the two major national sources of data about crime in the United States, supplementing the general guidelines for interpreting crime statistics given in my book Measuring Crime: Behind the Statistics. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted data collections around the world, and the comic perfectly captures the idea that almost every statistic published from data collected in 2020 or 2021 will need a footnote explaining how it may need to be interpreted differently than statistics for other years. ![]()
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