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Statistics for the USA were drawn from a publication compiled by the FBI as part of the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) programme. The UCR adopts standard definitions of crime types that must be reported on by United States police agencies to enable comparative data to be generated. The publication is available at www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_00/00crime213.pdf
The definitions used for violent crime in America differ considerably from the New Zealand definition of violent offences. In UCR statistics, violent crime is composed of four offences: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. All violent crimes involve force or threat of force. However, a subsection of New Zealand violent & sexual assault offences can be drawn together to provide a comparative statistic to the UCR violence benchmark. The offences included in the American definition of violent crime and the equivalent New Zealand offences are provided in Table A1 in the appendix.
The following tables indicate the number of offences and the rate of recorded offences per 100,000 population for the four categories of violent crime as according to the American definition.
In 2000, America had more than double the rate of forcible rape per capita than New Zealand, more than three times the rate of murder and non-negligent manslaughter and robbery than New Zealand per capita, and over four times the rate of aggravated assault per capita than New Zealand. The rate of total violent crime for America in 2000 was 506.1 per 100,000 population; almost four times the rate of 132.6 for New Zealand. Great caution, however, should be adopted in interpreting these comparative figures. In addition to the factors discussed in the earlier section "Comparisons between different countries", there are significant differences in the criminal systems and offence definitions in the two jurisdictions.
