Foreword.

Uniform is defined by Webster as that which is "marked by complete conformity to a rule or pattern or by similarity in salient detail or practice." For the better part of the twentieth century, the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program has collected, tabulated, and presented crime statistics from city, county, and state law enforcement agencies in the United States in this standardized manner. Despite the Program's growth and expansion, witnessed by the evolution of its main product from a thin booklet of limited statistics to the comprehensive report that this foreword introduces, the goal of UCR has never wavered. The objective is to compile and maintain useful, reliable, multilevel crime statistics for law enforcement as well as researchers, academicians, the media, and the general public.

Just as the narrow scope of data first collected and published in 1930 has given way to the broader view provided by the modern Summary system, that system is now steadily giving way to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Entering the new century, this venerable Program is being revitalized by the possibilities that NIBRS presents. Not only are the number of crimes tallied, but the nature, diversity, and characteristics of crime are recorded and studied. This information and its implications may well become as important a weapon in the crime-fighting arsenal as any that an agency possesses.

The foreword of the first Uniform Crime Reports publication, Uniform Crime Reporting: A Complete Manual for Police, published in 1929 states, "The urgent need for national crime statistics in the United States is so well recognized as to require no debate." The need continues today. The national staff of UCR rededicates itself in this seventy-first year of the Program to meeting the goal set forth at that time: providing meaningful and dependable national crime data.