How much U.S. crime is victimless?

February 16, 2010 9:07 PM

Please help me find statistics on victimless crime. More specifically, I’m looking for statistics showing what proportion of U.S. crime during a given period—a month, a year, whatever—is considered victimless. (Without endorsing this definition, for this project I consider victimless crime to be crime that doesn’t involve direct harm to others: drug use not linked to violent trafficking, sodomy (pre-Lawrence v. Texas), public nudity, etc.)
posted by anonymous to Law & Government (2 answers total)

UCR (Uniform Crime Reports) is your best bet for official data, but it is by no means a perfect source of information. The NCVS (National Crime Victimization Survey) is considered a better alternative by some, but of course it isn't much use to you. You can get UCR data from the FBI.gov website or from ICPSR--just type that into Google and register for a free account.
posted by _cave at 9:11 PM on February 16, 2010

You may have thought of this already, but be prepared for people to argue that your definition is problematic--even if no violence was committed in selling drugs, it may well have been upstream; debate on the line between simple public nudity and criminal sexual exposition to a child (or attempt to do so); and that sort of thing.

That said, check out:

Uniform Crime Reports (as _cave mentioned above)
USDOJ Bureau of Justice Statistics
US Census Bureau Statistical Abstract of the United States
This crime statistics aggregator
References in the "Crime statistics" article on Wikipedia

Good luck!

(IANYL/TINLA.)
posted by tellumo at 9:43 PM on February 16, 2010