Crime classification manual

Violent crime is a growing concern in our society: the number of reported cases of murder, arson, and sexual assault climbs steadily every year. At the same time, there has been a decrease in the number of these crimes solved - in the past thirty years there has been a 25 percent drop in the solution rate for homicide alone. Law enforcement officials feel mounting public pressure to apprehend perpetrators as quickly as possible, yet their efforts are hampered by poor communication between police departments, a lack of common terminology, and the increased mobility of criminals. Each police department has traditionally operated independently, using its own investigative techniques and its own language and definitions, with limited interdepartmental training. The Crime Classification Manual is a diagnostic system that will standardize terminology and for the first time formally classify the critical characteristics of the perpetrators and victims of the three major violent crimes - murder, arson, and sexual assault. It is the result of nearly a decade of study of murderers, rapists, child molesters, abductors, and arsonists at the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Cri