Lightcast’s crime data comes from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program and includes crime counts broken into two categories: violent and property crime.
Violent crime: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.
Property crime: offenses of burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft.
Local law enforcement agencies collect detailed incident level data regarding individual offenses and arrests and submit them to the National Incident-Based Reporting System using prescribed data elements and data values.
This data is often updated during the Q4 data run for the previous calendar year. Crime data is available at the county level for the United States. It is important to note that the data is collected by the location of the reporting agency, not by the location of the crime. Therefore, in cases where the reporting agency is not located in the county in which the crime was committed, the crime will be counted in the county of the reporting agency’s location.