Ferguson Civilian Review Board (FCRB)

Crime Data

One of the responsibilities of the Ferguson Civilian Review Board, per ordinance, is to “…review crime data…to identify patterns and trends.”

To do this, Ferguson Police Department crime data is displayed on various graphs that make patterns and trends easy to see.

More than 18,000 law enforcement agencies around the U.S. voluntarily submit crime data to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. The FPD is one of those agencies. Information on the UCR program, the data it gathers, and how to interpret that data, can be found on the FBI website at Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program — FBI. 

Under the UCR program in Missouri, agency data is sent to the Missouri Highway Patrol, which is then compiled and sent to the FBI UCR program. The data in the Missouri Highway Patrol repository is much timelier and is now being used instead of data from the FBI UCR site.

In addition, the Ferguson Police Department has recently implemented several interactive dashboards on the City of Ferguson website. One of those dashboards includes past crime data reported to the FBI and also current year crime data. The crime data dashboard can be found by clicking the tab for “Calls for Service and Crime”.

Crime Graphs

The following graphs show FPD data reported to the UCR program from the year 1985 through last year. 

 The number of crime incidents reported and the number of incidents cleared are both shown on the graphs. Incidents are cleared when at least one person is arrested, charged, and turned over to the court for prosecution; or when exceptional circumstances prevent the arrest and charging of the offender (i.e., victim’s refusal to cooperate with prosecution, the offender is in jail in another jurisdiction and can’t be extradited, etc.).

 The data shown is for Part I crimes, broken into Property crimes and Violent crimes. Part I crimes are serious crimes that are likely to be reported. Part II crimes are less serious (drug abuse, vandalism, disorderly conduct, etc.) and are not included in this data. The FBI definitions and categorizations for all crimes can be found at FBI — Offense Definitions.

In order to smooth the data, three year rolling averages are plotted. Linear trends in the data are also plotted.

  1. Violent Crime
  2. Property Crime
  3. Clearance Rates

According to the UCR program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: homicide (murder and nonnegligent manslaughter), rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes involve force or threat of force.

violent crime graph

This chart shows an upward trend in violent crime reported in Ferguson. It also shows a growing gap since 2010 between the number of violent crimes that are reported and the number cleared.