ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) trends for serious violent crime: sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault. Households and persons who provide information to the NCVS after being selected to be in the sample are said to have responded to the survey and are called respondents. The published NCVS victimization rates count the most serious offense for each incident, using a hierarchy rule. The UCR counts a crime where it occurred. The location-counting rule makes little difference for national statistics, but it can cause UCR counts for cities with large numbers of commuters and visitors to be higher than NCVS counts of crimes reported to the police for those cities. The NCVS statistics are limited to crimes against households and persons living in households and certain types of group dwellings in the US. Measurement error arises because the NCVS relies on respondents’ answers to questions about their experiences with criminal victimization.
