FBI Fraud Arrests by Field Office, 2018

Each year, crime data geeks look forward to the publication of the CJIS "Crime in the United States" report.  On September 30th, the FBI was able to share the Uniform Crime Report information for 2018, describing information about Violent Crime, Property Crime, Homicides, and Arrests gathered from most of the law enforcement agencies in the United States.  UCR is old news though.  Many short-comings in the system have led to changes which are adopted in the new NIBRS system, the National Incident-Based Reporting System.  For people like me, who care about cybercrime, hacking, malware, and fraud, this is great news!  Many budget decisions have been made over the years about how to allocate police resources based on UCR data, and NONE OF THE CATEGORIES I CARE ABOUT WERE PART of UCR!   But NIBRS has many of those things, rolled up under the category "fraud."

Fraud Offenses are called "26" offenses and have the following breakdown:

• 26A = False Pretense / Swindle / Confidence Game 
• 26B = Credit Card / ATM Fraud 
• 26C = Impersonation 
• 26D = Welfare Fraud
• 26E = Wire Fraud
• 26F = Identity Theft
• 26G = Hacking / Computer Invasion

(The NIBRS User Manual has the complete list of codes for other offenses.)

Last year, students in my Criminal Justice 502 - Computer Forensics class at UAB (the University of Alabama at Birmingham) - attempted to study fraud statistics from the 2017 NIBRS data, and sadly, their conclusion was that they were dramatically under-reported, and if used at all, used only in a "rolled-up" capacity.  NIBRS is currently receiving data from 6,600 of 18,000 potential law enforcement agencies.  By 2021, all agencies should be using NIBRS instead of UCR.

With shame, I mention that Alabama is one of the states boycotting NIBRS, calling it an "unfunded mandate" and refusing to participate.  In the 2017 data, only the city of Hoover shared NIBRS-formatted crime statistics with the Department of Justice.  (Hopefully we will see an improvement in this process as Alabama is now one of the states receiving federal funding to improve their NIBRS participation in the form of an NCS-X Initiative Grant.  In October 2018, an additional $49 Million was released to encourage greater participation.   A sampling study was conducted by BJS to determine that if 400 additional agencies were added, it would have a marked improvement of the accuracy and usefulness of NIBRS data, and these agencies and their states are now targeted, for the fourth year in a row, with Federal funding to assist in implementation.  Eleven Alabama Law Enforcement agencies were among the 400 on the "List of NCS-X Sample Agencies as of August 2018" making them eligible to apply for funding.  Only four states have not received any funding to date - AK, AZ, MS, and NM. Sixteen states have fully implemented NIBRS, and four more have >80% participation.)

We are still looking forward to seeing the 2018 NIBRS data, which would normally have been released by now, but did get one early present from CJIS, in the form of FBI NIBRS data from each field office.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/ucr-statistics-their-proper-use

A caution before reading on, despite the FBI's repeated warning to not use crime data to rank jurisdictions, journalists repeatedly put out reports called things like "The Top Worst Cities for Murder" each year after the UCR is released.  In the table below, we have extracted the FBI data for Fraud Arrests for each of their 56 field offices.  This is intended to show how fraud arrests (including all of the categories above) are still a MINOR focus of law enforcement by proportion of arrests, so PLEASE don't use this data to rank.  (More reasons not to rank in the link above, which is labeled "Caution Against Ranking" on the Crime in the United States page.

As part of that caution, consider a couple numbers from the table below.  While the average for all field offices was that 10.9% of all FBI arrest in 2018 were for "Fraud" categories, the Los Angeles Field Office number was more than double that amount, at 27.6%.  Why?  Is it because there is more fraud in LA than most places?  Not really.  Their "Fraud Arrests per 100,000 population" is 1.4, nearly double the national average of 0.8. Los Angeles serves the largest population of any field office -- 19.5 million people -- allowing their office composition to contain specialized squads not found in smaller offices. One such squad includes agents dedicated to working "Business Email Compromise" and they have been doing an amazing job at that task.  Because of the STRATEGIC FOCUS of the Los Angeles office, many criminals are arrested and charged there even when the victims may come from across the United States and the World.

Similarly, the Miami, District of Columbia, and New York offices have significantly higher fraud arrest rates per 100,000 populations than other offices. This also reflects the composition of their offices. New York City FBI arrested 1,466 total people in 2018 -- nearly 500 more than any other office, and triple the number of the arrests in only slightly smaller Dallas, Boston, Atlanta, or Charlotte. As a global super power in the banking world, New York City has one of the largest cybercrime offices in the country, including many New York Police Department personnel who serve as Task Force Officers within the FBI's Cybercrime and Financial Crime Task Forces. In offices like NYC, many cases where a local prosecution may have been brought elsewhere by the police have been elevated to a federal level, taking advantage of the unique concentration of banks AND FEDERAL RESOURCES, to make possible their 268 fraud arrests in a field office serving 13.4 million people. Similar combined state/local/federal task forces raise their arrest rate in other categories, partly as a result of the unique partnerships found in New York as a result of the restructuring of the FBI following the terrorist attacks there on 9/11.
Other office numbers may be skewed by the presence of an extremely gifted or well-funded state or local law enforcement agencies, which may work many cases at the state/local level that in other offices may have become federal cases.  

So again, please don't use these numbers for "head-to-head rankings," but do enjoy seeing what is going on in YOUR FBI office!  We look forward to seeing the full NIBRS data soon, but in the meantime, found the data below a fascinating representation of how fraud is fought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

(Full FBI Arrestees by NIBRS Offense Code by FBI Field Office, 2018 available here)
(Crime rate per 100,000 is ((Arrests / Population) x 100,000), for example, in NYC, (268/13,464,042 = 0.000019904 * 100,000 = 1.99 (rounded to 2.0) per 100,000 population.)

Field Office	Fraud Arrests	Total Arrests	Population	% Fraud Arrests	Fraud arrests per 100k population
Grand Total All Offices	2,645	24,174	330,611,016	10.9%	0.8
Albany	19	193	3,959,142	9.84%	0.5
Albuquerque	11	368	2,095,428	2.99%	0.5
Anchorage	3	110	737,438	2.73%	0.4
Atlanta	86	635	10,519,475	13.54%	0.8
Baltimore	20	397	7,009,889	5.04%	0.3
Birmingham	16	153	2,885,679	10.46%	0.6
Boston	78	515	10,654,326	15.15%	0.7
Buffalo	28	318	2,745,324	8.81%	1.0
Charlotte	22	548	10,383,620	4.01%	0.2
Chicago	72	399	9,299,342	18.05%	0.8
Cincinnati	23	257	5,973,003	8.95%	0.4
Cleveland	40	426	5,716,439	9.39%	0.7
Columbia	25	313	5,084,127	7.99%	0.5
Dallas	42	556	10,937,892	7.55%	0.4
Denver	55	400	6,273,301	13.75%	0.9
Detroit	132	762	9,995,915	17.32%	1.3
El Paso	13	217	1,280,400	5.99%	1.0
Honolulu	19	92	1,420,491	20.66	1.3
Houston	45	348	8,739,890	12.93%	0.5
Indianapolis	63	541	6,691,878	11.65%	0.9
Jackson	19	230	2,986,530	8.26%	0.6
Jacksonville	42	129	5,292,491	32.56%	0.8
Kansas City	21	572	6,107,812	3.67%	0.3
Knoxville	16	413	2,634,746	3.87%	0.6
Las Vegas	13	294	3,034,392	4.42%	0.4
Little Rock	11	209	3,013,825	5.26%	0.4
Los Angeles	270	978	19,503,778	27.61%	1.4
Louisville	17	177	4,468,402	0.96%	0.4
Memphis	35	292	4,135,264	11.99%	0.8
Miami	241	1048	7,101,580	0.23%	3.4
Milwaukee	28	180	5,813,568	15.56%	0.5
Minneapolis	35	620	7,253,491	5.65%	0.5
Mobile	14	196	2,002,192	7.14%	0.7
New Haven	24	315	3,572,665	7.62%	0.7
New Orleans	13	234	4,659,978	5.56%	0.3
New York	268	1466	13,464,042	18.28%	2.0
Newark	55	533	8,055,342	10.32%	0.7
Norfolk	15	108	1,759,484	13.89%	0.9
Oklahoma City	20	252	3,943,079	7.94%	0.5
Omaha	10	294	5,085,413	0.34%	0.2
Philadelphia	106	723	9,948,745	14.66%	1.1
Phoenix	34	773	7,171,646	0.44%	0.5
Pittsburgh	40	543	5,517,325	7.37%	0.7
Portland	32	303	4,190,713	10.56%	0.8
Richmond	10	110	4,153,705	9.09%	0.2
Sacramento	33	298	8,099,068	11.07%	0.4
Salt Lake City	53	606	5,977,618	8.75%	0.9
St. Louis	26	422	2,930,145	6.16%	0.9
San Antonio	36	879	7,743,663	0.41%	0.5
San Diego	33	384	3,529,064	8.59%	0.9
San Francisco	71	342	8,425,135	20.76%	0.8
San Juan1	40	716	3,443,582	5.59%	1.2
Seattle	34	359	7,535,591	9.47%	0.5
Springfield	12	157	3,441,738	7.64%	0.3
Tampa	30	800	8,905,254	3.75%	0.3
Washington, Dc	76	671	3,306,951	11.33%	2.3