What Are Part 2 Offenses Under the UCR Program?

Part 2 offenses were the broader, generally less serious category of crimes in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, tracked only through arrest data rather than every reported incident. The list ran from simple assault and fraud to vandalism, drug violations, DUI, disorderly conduct, and a catch-all “all other offenses” bucket. The label came from the UCR’s Summary Reporting System, which the FBI retired on January 1, 2021, though the same idea survives under a new name in the system that replaced it.¹

The Full List of Part 2 Offenses

Under the Summary Reporting System, Part 2 covered every criminal act that wasn’t a Part 1 offense, with traffic violations as the sole exception.² The recognized categories were:

Simple assault: an attack or attempted attack without a weapon and without serious injury to the victim
Forgery and counterfeiting: altering, copying, or faking documents or objects to deceive, including possession
Fraud: deliberately misleading someone to obtain money, property, or a legal right, including confidence games, bad checks, and false pretenses
Embezzlement: stealing money or property entrusted to your care
Stolen property offenses: buying, receiving, possessing, selling, or concealing property known to be stolen
Vandalism: willfully destroying or damaging another person’s property
Weapons offenses: unlawful manufacture, sale, possession, or carrying of firearms, knives, or other weapons
Prostitution and commercialized vice
Non-forcible sex offenses, such as statutory rape and indecent exposure
Drug abuse violations: arrests for possession, sale, or manufacture of controlled substances
Gambling: bookmaking, numbers running, and operating or promoting illegal gambling
Offenses against the family and children: nonsupport, neglect, desertion, and abuse
Driving under the influence
Liquor law violations: illegal manufacture, sale, or possession of alcohol, excluding DUI and drunkenness
Drunkenness
Disorderly conduct
Vagrancy
Curfew and loitering violations
Runaways: persons under 18 reported as runaways
All other offenses: a catch-all for any arrest not fitting the categories above or the Part 1 list

Simple Assault Versus Aggravated Assault

The line between simple assault and aggravated assault is the distinction that trips readers up most. Aggravated assault, a Part 1 offense, involves an attack intended to cause severe bodily injury, typically with a weapon or force likely to produce death or great harm. Simple assault covered everything else: a shove during an argument, a slap, throwing an object, or any confrontation without a weapon or serious injury.²

Fraud, Forgery, and Embezzlement

The UCR drew careful lines between the Part 2 financial crimes. Fraud required deliberately lying to trick someone out of money or property. Forgery and counterfeiting meant creating or altering a fake document or object to pass it off as genuine. Embezzlement specifically involved stealing something placed in your custody, such as an employee skimming from a cash register.³ Larceny-theft was a Part 1 offense that specifically excluded these trust-based and deception-based crimes.

Why Part 2 Data Only Showed Arrests

The single most important thing to understand about Part 2 offenses is how they were counted. Part 1 crimes were logged every time an agency learned about one, whether or not anyone was caught. Part 2 crimes were counted only when someone was actually arrested. If no arrest happened, the offense didn’t appear in national statistics at all.

For each Part 2 arrest, agencies reported the offense charged along with the arrested person’s age, sex, and race.⁴ No information about the incident itself, no victim demographics, no circumstances. The result is that Part 2 statistics reflect police activity and enforcement priorities as much as they reflect how often these crimes actually occurred.

A second quirk further shrank the numbers. The Summary Reporting System applied a hierarchy rule: when a single incident involved multiple offenses, agencies reported only the most serious one. A person arrested for both a Part 1 and a Part 2 crime arising from the same event had the Part 2 offense ignored entirely, and someone arrested for several Part 2 offenses at once had only the most serious one scored.⁵ Part 2 arrest totals systematically undercounted how often these offenses occurred alongside other crimes.

How Part 2 Compared to Part 1

Part 1 offenses, sometimes called Index Crimes, were the eight offense types the UCR’s founders selected because they were serious, occurred regularly across the country, and were likely to be reported to police.² They split into four violent crimes and four property crimes:

Violent: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault
Property: burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson

The difference went beyond severity. Part 1 reporting captured every incident an agency learned about, plus clearance information showing which offenses were solved. Part 2 reporting captured only arrests. Part 1 data gave a reasonably complete picture of how often those crimes occurred; Part 2 data captured only the slice of criminal activity that ended in an arrest.

What Replaced Part 2: NIBRS Group A and Group B

The Summary Reporting System was retired on January 1, 2021, and the FBI now collects crime data exclusively through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). NIBRS replaces the Part 1/Part 2 framework with Group A and Group B offenses.¹

The change is more than a rename. NIBRS tracks 52 Group A offenses across 22 categories, a large expansion from the eight Part 1 crimes that used to get full incident reporting.⁶ Many former Part 2 offenses, including fraud, embezzlement, vandalism, weapons violations, drug violations, and simple assault, are now Group A offenses with full incident-level reporting. Agencies file details about when and where these crimes happened, who the victims were, and the circumstances of the event, not just arrest counts.

Group B is the arrest-only category that carries forward the old Part 2 approach. Ten Group B categories remain:⁷

Bad checks
Curfew, loitering, and vagrancy violations
Disorderly conduct
Driving under the influence
Drunkenness
Nonviolent family offenses
Liquor law violations
Peeping Tom
Trespass of real property
All other offenses

NIBRS also eliminated the hierarchy rule, so multiple offenses within a single incident are all counted rather than collapsed into the most serious one.

Where to Find the Data

The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer at cde.ucr.cjis.gov is the main public portal for national crime statistics, with interactive charts, downloadable CSV datasets, and filtering by year, geography, and offense.⁸ Historical publications from the Summary Reporting System era, including the Part 2 arrest tables through 2019, are archived on the FBI’s UCR Publications page.⁹

One caution when working across the two systems: Part 2 arrest data from the SRS era and Group B arrest data from NIBRS are not directly comparable. The offense categories were reorganized, the hierarchy rule was dropped, and the pool of reporting agencies shifted during the transition. Comparing raw numbers across the two systems without adjusting for those differences produces misleading results.

1
Federal Bureau of Investigation. NIBRS Resources for Law Enforcement
2
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Offense Definitions
3
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Offense Definitions
4
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime in the U.S. 2019 Methodology
5
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook
6
Bureau of Justice Statistics. National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS)
7
Federal Bureau of Investigation. NIBRS Offense Codes
8
Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI Crime Data Explorer
9
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime/Law Enforcement Stats (UCR Program)