ABSTRACT
Despite people’s concern over murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, aggravated assault, and forcible rape, these offenses represent a small proportion of the crimes known to the police. According to the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), when using crime indexes, these crimes made up only 9 percent of all index crimes. Robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft made up the remaining 91 percent. 1 (The total number of arson offenses was not included.) Thus the crime picture, insofar as the police and FBI are concerned, is dominated by offenses against property. In this chapter we will briefly consider the dimensions of these crimes and some of the social factors contributing to them. Remember that the UCR no longer reports index crimes; rather, it looks only at totals. For 2005 the totals are over 10 million property crimes versus 1,390,000 violent crimes (note that robbery is considered a violent crime).
