Which FBI publications include sexual assault data broken down by race and ethnicity through 2024 or 2025?
Executive summary
The FBI publishes sexual‑assault-related data with race and ethnicity variables primarily through its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program and the Crime Data Explorer (CDE), with specific tables and NIBRS incident-level files offering race/ethnicity breakdowns through 2024; however, coverage and definitions have changed over time and not all agencies report ethnicity, creating important caveats [1] [2] [3]. Federal victimization surveys from the Bureau of Justice Statistics provide complementary demographic breakdowns for sexual assault through 2024 but are separate from FBI publications [4].
1. Crime in the United States / UCR tables: historic and current breakdowns
The annual "Crime in the United States" product — and the UCR topical tables that accompany it — have long published rape/sex‑offense and arrest tables disaggregated by race and, where available, Hispanic ethnicity; sample UCR tables (for example Table 43) show race and ethnicity columns and include notes that not all agencies supply ethnicity so totals may not match [3] [2]. The UCR summary for 2024 compiles those outputs and includes sex‑offense categories and victim/offender relationship and demographic breakdowns, indicating that sex‑offense information with race/ethnicity is part of the 2024 compilation [2].
2. Crime Data Explorer (CDE) and NIBRS incident data: the most granular FBI source
The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer (CDE) is the online platform that hosts UCR and NIBRS data and lets users query incident‑level and aggregated statistics by offense, including sex offenses, with race and ethnicity fields in NIBRS incident and arrest records; the CDE is the route to access these 2013‑onward NIBRS breakdowns through 2024 [1] [2]. NIBRS shifts the program from summary counts to incident‑level reporting and therefore contains more detailed victim and offender demographic variables — including race — though reporting completeness varies by agency [2].
3. Arrest tables and public‑use datasets that include race/ethnicity
Separate FBI arrest tables and public‑use files derived from UCR/CDE outputs include arrests by offense with age, sex, and race fields; researchers and data repositories (for example ICPSR distributions) have published UCR arrest files through 2021 and later extracts that include race and ethnicity elements as reported to the FBI, and those feeds continue to be available via the CDE for more recent years up to 2024 where processed [5] [1]. These arrest series cover "sex offenses" as offense categories and provide demographic shares, but arrests do not equate to victimization prevalence and reflect reporting and enforcement patterns [5].
4. Important methodological caveats: definitions, coverage, and missing ethnicity
Users must account for two constraints when using FBI products: first, the FBI changed the rape definition in 2013 and has updated which series use the legacy versus revised definitions, affecting comparability across years and how sexual‑assault counts are reported in aggregate tables [6]. Second, the FBI itself warns that not all agencies report Hispanic ethnicity and that race/ethnicity totals may not sum to offense totals; this reduces completeness for ethnicity breakdowns even if race categories are commonly populated [3] [2].
5. Complementary sources and gaps the FBI does not fill
For demographic estimates of sexual assault that attempt to measure unreported victimization rather than law‑enforcement records, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey publishes sexual‑assault and rape victimization rates by demographic characteristics through 2024 and is frequently used alongside FBI outputs to understand racial and ethnic patterns from a survey perspective rather than police records alone [4]. Any firm claims about prevalence by race/ethnicity should therefore triangulate FBI UCR/NIBRS tables (CDE and the UCR Summary of Reported Crimes in the Nation, 2024) with NCVS and peer‑reviewed studies because reporting bias, differential reporting rates, and changing definitions materially shape the FBI’s race/ethnicity breakdowns [2] [4] [6].