Information on the collection of police statistics is hardly available. The US lacks a uniform system of nationwide statistic collection, in particular since the recording of crimes is arranged differently in each state.

Statisics on crime are compiled on a national level by the FBI in Uniform Crime Reports, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and in the National Crime Victimization Survey. The lack of standardization of data offers few reliable statistics.

Information collected for the UCRis given either by an office, or by the police. Before 2013, most information was dispatched by mail, leading to a long and expensive process of analysing data. Today, data is collected online in order to accelerate the process.

Although the survey process is very complex, statistics provide an insightful view of crime in the United States. The UCR provides statistics on the number of murders, attacks on police men, general crime, and hate crimes. In this publication, the FBI documents on the number of incidents in which a partial or complete connection with ethnic origin, religion, gender, sexuality, etc. could be detected.

In the National Crime Viciminization Survey, data was collected by the Bureau of Justice. Samples of 160,000 people were interviewed twice a year. Here information about the rate, characteristics, and the effects of crime in the United States is collected.

Participants are asked, for example, how likely it would be for them to be a victim of rape, robbery, assault, theft, and other crimes. They shall indicate their sex, give their ethnic origin, their age, and say if they live in an urban environment or not. This question focuses on victims of violence rather than on ethnic majority, as well as on how environmental factors can contribute.

Althouh there is a nation wide colletion of data on crimes; there are no rules on the way crimes are to be specified. This means that police officers can distort characteristics of crimes by not reporting every incident. Even information considered ‘urgent to report’ varies from one state to another.

As with the discrepencies in reporting, there is also no mandatory and complete collection of data on abuse and misconduct of the police.