UCR - Unfounded / Clearances

Incident reports that have a UCR classification of UNFOUNDED are listed on the RETURN A Monthly Return of Offenses report. The number of ACTUAL OFFENSES (Column 4) will always show the difference between the Offenses Reported (Column 2) and Unfounded (Column 3).

The following important consideration is a quote from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook: "If after scoring an actual offense in one of the Part I categories new information is developed through investigation which shows that the offense in fact did not occur, it may be unfounded on the next monthly Return A submitted by the Agency"  This means that it is possible and correct for a Return A to reflect a negative number in the column for ACTUAL OFFENSES (Column 4). Such a circumstance can occur when the number of offenses reported in a previous month for any given category that are subsequently reclassified as unfounded, exceed the number of OFFENSES REPORTED (Column 2) for the current month. While reporting a negative number is not common, it can occur and it is an acceptable and accurate practice for monthly reporting.   Similarly the *clearance this month of an incident scored in a previous months report may result in a situation where a RETURN A shows more clearances (Column 5 or 6) than Actual Offenses (Column 4).

*FBI-UCR standards make no distinction between Clearances and Exceptional Clearances for the purposes of RETURN A.

Generally Crimestar RMS avoids this running tally approach to corrections of past UCR report submissions.   In order to correct previous months data in the current months report it would be necessary to maintain a double entry accounting type system representing the historical changes to any given report.  This is because corrections to past months data in the current months report often involves subtracting values from current months report to document the correction. In order to do that we would need to know (a.) what values to subtract; (b) what values were reported to your respective reporting authority.    This is not as simple as it might sound.   Since some agencies choose to run UCR reports for purposes other than state and federal reporting it is difficult to know exactly what has and has not been previously reported to your respective reporting authority.  To avoid all this complication and significantly increase the accuracy of UCR reporting, when Crimestar detects that data from a previous months report has changed in the current month, the program will notify the user that changes to previous months data has been detected and suggest that the UCR reports for those previous months be resubmitted.