It's time to stop relying on FBI data alone to compare sexual violence rates between U.S. states
On its own website, the Federal Bureau of Investigation "strongly discourages" data users against using rankings based on their own 'Uniform Crime Reporting' numbers to compare different locations.
The FBI notes that 'incomplete analyses have often created misleading perceptions which adversely affect geographic entities and their residents' — this, 'despite repeated warnings against these practices.'
This explains the FBI's own 'longstanding policy against ranking participating law enforcement agencies on the basis of crime data alone.' Such rankings, they say, 'ignore the uniqueness of each locale,' given the 'many factors that cause the nature and type of crime to vary from place to place.'
Despite those cautions, this has been common practice for years among scholars, journalists and public-facing websites like Statista and WalletHub, which have used FBI data as a primary metric to compare U.S. states on sexual violence and other crimes.
The many factors shaping FBI data
FBI numbers do tell us something meaningful, especially when considered alongside other available data.
'For complex problems like this that are hard to measure and hard to get disclosure, it's really beneficial to have a lot of sources of information,' says Kathleen C. Basile, an associate director for science in the Division of Violence Prevention in the Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Her colleague Sharon G. Smith, also a behavioral scientist in the Division of Violence Prevention at the CDC, shares in a joint interview with the Deseret News that data from both FBI arrests and emergency room admissions give us an idea of how victims of sexual violence 'evaluate what happened to them' and how often they 'feel comfortable telling an authority.'
'Do they think it's serious enough to report? Are they worried about being shamed? Are they worried about retaliation?'
A community where these kinds of fears dominate would have less reporting of sexual crime — whereas healthier norms of sharing and openness could be associated in a given locale with markedly higher official figures.
There are many other personal and systemic factors that can influence whether something like sexual violence against a youth or adult is reported to police. In addition to police distrust and uncertainty at their ability to help, individuals may feel shame and fear of retaliation, and choose not to report due to fear about being blamed or not believed, feelings of guilt or embarrassment, worries about social or professional consequences, and complex, ongoing relationships with the perpetrator.
Others face pressure from unsupportive friends or family, aren't emotionally ready to speak due to emotional trauma, or struggle with gaps in memory caused by trauma or substance use. Limited access to support services can also be a reporting barrier, as can concerns about legal processes that risk reopening emotional wounds.
There can also be limited awareness of what 'counts' as sexual violence, alongside another set of factors that the FBI emphasizes can vary among different U.S. locations in a way that impacts crime rates. These factors include population size and density, the proportion of young people in a given area, economic conditions, cultural and religious characteristics, divorce rates, and state-level policies. The FBI also highlights the importance of the 'effective strength of local law enforcement agencies,' 'citizens' attitudes toward crime' and the 'crime reporting practices of the community,' examined in more detail below.
Assault never reported to the FBI
Manhattan Institute scholar Jeffrey H. Anderson reported in City Journal last fall that only 85% of law enforcement agencies submitted data for 2023 — meaning 'the FBI is capturing only a portion of crimes reported to police.'
According to the Marshall Project's analysis of participation data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting, nearly one-third of the nation's 18,000 law enforcement agencies were also missing from the FBI's 2022 crime statistics.
After his own analysis of short-comings in the FBI data in 2022, Theodore P. Cross, a professor of social work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, concluded that 'this is a human process in which a sophisticated data collection task is put on the shoulders of law enforcement professionals who have a million different responsibilities.'
Cross said in a recent Deseret News interview that 'many law enforcement agencies are not going to have data specialists. They're not going to have people whose primary responsibility is data. It's going to be an added function for somebody who might be doing 12 other things.'
Because there can be long delays between when someone is summoned to court and when they are actually arrested, some arrests are never officially reported to the FBI in certain parts of the country.
'The effect is to reduce the arrest rate,' Cross explained. 'We found that it was a bigger problem for some types of crime than others,' he said, noting it was 'more common in sexual assault cases' based on data from Massachusetts. (Officials at Utah's Bureau of Criminal Identification told the Deseret News that the state has quality control measures in place to prevent this issue.)
Pressure to undercount sexual assault
An earlier, 2014 analysis of federal sexual violence figures, by University of Kansas law professor Corey Rayburn Yung, found that 22% of the 210 studied police departments (from cities with populations of more than 100,000) demonstrated 'substantial statistical irregularities in their rape data.'
Drawing on a statistical method to detect outlier cities 'with highly unusual patterns in their submitted crime data' between 1995 and 2012, Yung identified 46 large U.S. cities that 'appear to be undercounting on a consistently high level.'
Yung highlighted 'questionable reporting techniques to create the false impression of decreasing violent crime' as one explanation for undercounting, connected with pressure to show improved crime statistics year after year. This includes cases where officers label an allegation as 'unfounded' with little or no subsequent investigation, or they misclassify the incident as a lesser offense. In other instances, officers may fail to file any report at all after interviewing a rape victim.
All this may contribute to artificially low statistics in different locations in the U.S., including New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, which have all been highly scrutinized.
Journalist Soraya Chemaly, for instance, reported in 2014 that Baltimore had 'a suspicious 80 percent decline' in rape statistics over 15 years starting in 1995 (compared with a 7% reduction nationally during the same period).
In his 2014 report, entitled 'How to Lie with Rape Statistics,' Yung noted that the number of jurisdictions that appear to be undercounting had increased by 61% during the time period studied, prompting him to warn about systematically misunderstanding the scope of America's 'hidden rape crisis.'
Sexual violence data from cities like Philadelphia, St. Louis, Atlanta, Dallas, Milwaukee and Oakland also raised significant concerns about accuracy or reliability. By contrast, Salt Lake City and Provo were on the list of cities without any anomalies in their data.
Higher agency participation, higher reporting?
Crime numbers vary based on the 'effective strength of law enforcement agencies,' according to the FBI. Utah has repeatedly ranked among the states with a higher percentage of law enforcement agencies submitting data to the FBI — including 98.5% in 2019 (seventh highest), 92% in 2022 (15th highest) and among the 28 states with 100% of agencies reporting in 2024.
Officials from Utah's Bureau of Criminal Identification in the Department of Public Safety told the Deseret News that the state passed the FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) Quality Control Audit in June 2024 'with no issue or areas of concern.'
Thanks, in part, to a state law requiring agencies to report data, 98.14% of Utah's population in 2024 was covered by law enforcement agencies submitting information to the FBI.
Why does this matter when it comes to sexual violence statistics?
Because states with a higher percentage of law enforcement agencies reporting to the FBI also tend to show higher official rape rates. Our own review of available data confirms a general correlation between higher per capita rape rates and stronger agency participation.
High levels of crime data, therefore, may reflect better data capture — not necessarily more crime. This connection between high agency reporting and accurate crime statistics shows up in the other direction as well: States with lower FBI reporting (Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey) have less reliable rape estimates, with data likely unrepresentative and significantly understating the true extent of sexual violence.
Higher police trust, higher reporting?
Even more than other violent crime, rape goes unreported for a variety of reasons. Among felony crimes, a resolution or 'clearance' of sexual assaults through a successful report and arrest has the most variability.
That might explain why the percentage of rape or sexual assaults reported to police in the United States ranges so widely across different years. For instance, in a single year between 2017 and 2018, the percentage of rape or sexual assault victimizations reported to police declined from 40% to 25%, according to the U.S. Department of Justice — yet went up again to 33.9% the year afterward. And between 2022 and 2023, the percentage of rape or sexual assault victimizations reported to police went up from 21% to 46%, a 25-point swing.
Citing Yung's analysis, the writer Soraya Chemaly summarized that 'law enforcement officials who are dedicated to addressing these problems understand that higher reporting numbers are a sign of trust in police departments.'
Higher trust in police departments are an indicator that a given state has a greater willingness and tendency to report crime, including sexual violence.
Utahns have relatively high confidence in police, according to available state surveys over the past decade:
A 2013 Libertas survey of Utah citizens found 82% of Utah citizens surveyed responded affirmatively when asked 'speaking generally, do you trust or distrust police officers?'
A 2015 Dan Jones & Associates survey found 84% of Utahns saying they 'trust law enforcement in my local community to use their powers ethically and appropriately.'
A 2018 Salt Lake Tribune-Hinckley Institute of Politics survey found 94% of Utahns expressing confidence in police (60% a 'great deal' and 34% 'some').
And in 2021 — the year following George Floyd's death when rates of public trust in law enforcement plummeted across the nation — a Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll still found 82% of Utahns reporting that they 'mostly' or 'completely' trust their local police department.
These numbers show that Utah's public confidence in law enforcement is consistently high — sometimes 20 to 30 percentage points above the national average, depending on the year.
This suggests that Utahns may be especially willing to trust police with disclosures and reports, challenging earlier perceptions that state residents are generally less likely to report crimes.
One often-cited, concerning statistic from 2007 claimed that only '11.8% of individuals who have experienced rape or sexual assault in Utah reported the crime to law enforcement.'
While frequently referenced, that data is nearly two decades old. A more recent estimate from 2022, published by Utah's Public Health Indicator Based System, found that '27% of rape or sexual assaults were reported to the police in Utah,' which is closer to national reporting rates, which typically range from 21% to 40%, depending on the year.
How Utah compares with other states in willingness to report is almost impossible to know, since there is no comprehensive, state-by-state data showing how often rapes are reported to police.
National crime surveys simply haven't been designed to provide reliable state-level reporting rates. Furthermore, officials from Utah's Bureau of Criminal Identification told the Deseret News that they 'only receive data on crimes that are reported to law enforcement' and do not have access to any information that would indicate how many rapes go unreported or that reveal broader reporting trends.
Wide variation in measuring assault across the nation
States vary widely in how accurately they capture data on sexual violence. Ironically, those states that do a better job of reporting may appear worse in FBI statistics simply because they're more comprehensive, diligent and transparent.
All this again explains why the FBI has 'strongly discouraged' comparing locations on their crime data — something that happened again last week when national and local media touted new rankings of 'America's Most Dangerous Cities' drawing exclusively on FBI data. Sexual violence data is even more fraught.
This is different from suggesting that false reports are commonly being made in a way that inflates sexual violence rates. In fact, professor Julie Valentine, a sexual assault researcher at the University of Utah, told the Deseret News that if she could dispel one myth, it would be the widespread belief that 'there's a lot of false reports of rape.'
She notes that in Salt Lake and Utah counties, the rate of false reporting is as low as 3% to 9%.
False reports are not the problem. Rather, we're highlighting the likelihood of some states having artificially low rape rates (in a way that makes other states with more accurate counts appear unusually high), all based on inaccuracies and variation in FBI crime numbers that make state-by-state comparisons so fraught.
If we want to truly understand the scope of sexual violence in America, it's time to look beyond the surface of national crime statistics. The real story lies not just in the official numbers — but in how, where and whether they're reported at all.
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