ABSTRACT
You will recall that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) provide the most commonly cited information about crime, including juvenile crime, in the United States. These data, reported annually by law enforcement agencies throughout the United States, include crimes known to the police, arrests, and/or crimes cleared by arrest, and they provide one picture of who offends and how offending changes over time. With the focus of this chapter on youth violence specifi cally, it is necessary to rely on data for which the age of the offender is known; in other words, arrest data. Relying upon UCR arrest data places several limitations on our ability to understand youth violence. First, given the group nature of youthful offending (Snyder & Sickmund, 1999), clearance rates may overestimate the number of offenses committed by youths (although not the number of offenders) relative to adults. Second, youthful offenders tend to be less sophisticated and thus are more likely to be caught and/or arrested for their transgressions than are older offenders, which thereby infl ates the number of youthful offenders relative to older offenders.
