Governments, academics, and journalists often express an interest in cross-national crime comparisons, particularly
             between Canada and the United States. This interest stems from the desire to discover causal explanations for
             crime and to develop more effective criminal justice and social policies (Archer & Gartner 1984; Howard, Newman,
             Pridemore 2000). Unfortunately, methodological complexities have placed considerable barriers to such comparisons.
             Differences between national data sources, both for police reported and victimization surveys, have hampered
             accurate comparisons. Despite these divergent national data collection systems, the tendency has been to compare
             crime rates between countries with little or no attention to these limitations. Recently, the proliferation of the Internet
             has led to the growth in this type of misinformation.
             Recognizing the methodological hurdles, along with the benefits of comparing crime rates between Canada and
             the United States, the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics has undertaken the task of assessing the feasibility of
             comparing police reported statistics between Canada and the United States. This report, which represents the first
             step of this study, compares and contrasts the specific offence definitions, classification, and scoring rules between
             the Canadian and American Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) surveys. Where applicable, this discussion notes
             modifications that could allow for reliable cross-national comparisons.
             Official crime statistics also have general limitations. Many crimes are never reported to or detected by police and
             consequently, police reported data under-estimates the amount of crime, especially for highly unreported crimes
             such as sexual assault. National household victimization surveys, including the American National Crime Victimization
             Survey (NCVS) and the Canadian General Social Survey (GSS), can estimate the amount of unreporte...