Law in Failure: The Real Number of Crimes, Billions

Best-estimate annual U.S. crime count

This version uses one estimate per category, with no low/high ranges. It counts modeled criminal events or activity episodes—not arrests, defendants, convictions, or individual files.

#	Crime category	Best estimate
1	Concealed killings and crime-linked disappearances	5,000
2	Unreported assault and battery	2,750,000
3	Sexual offenses	8,000,000
4	Child, elder, and dependent-person abuse or neglect	8,000,000
5	Threats, stalking, harassment, and intimidation	8,000,000
6	Human trafficking, kidnapping, and unlawful confinement	100,000
7	Unreported personal and household-property crime	8,890,000
8	Theft and property crime against businesses and organizations	73,000,000
9	Fraud, scams, and identity crime	50,000,000
10	Unauthorized computer access and other cybercrime	15,000,000

#	Crime category	Best estimate
11	Child sexual abuse material activity and related online exploitation	1,900,000
12	Illegal drug-market transactions	1,880,000,000
13	Weapons and explosives offenses	1,000,000
14	Other illicit markets and organized crime	250,000,000
15	Financial, professional, and corporate crime	2,000,000
16	Criminal tax and revenue offenses	2,300,000
17	Criminal wage, labor, and workplace violations	3,000,000
18	Public corruption and criminal abuse of authority	25,000
19	Perjury, evidence offenses, obstruction, and witness intimidation	500,000
20	Environmental, wildlife, natural-resource, and animal crime	500,000

#	Crime category	Best estimate
21	Healthcare, pharmaceutical, food, and consumer-safety crime	5,000,000
22	Impaired driving and other serious road and transportation crimes	150,000,000
23	Criminal immigration, smuggling, document, customs, and border offenses	1,000,000
24	National-security and transnational offenses	20,000
25	Minor local and public-order crimes omitted from major totals	20,000,000

Straight totals

Estimated underlying criminal events per year, including CSAM activity: 2,490,990,000

Additional attempts, conspiracies, solicitation, facilitation, and accessory offenses: 250,000,000

Best-estimate broad statutory-offense total: 2,740,990,000 per year.

The 1,900,000 CSAM estimate is intended to represent courses of possession, production, acquisition, transmission, distribution, or related online-exploitation activity—not one crime for every image or video. Contact sexual abuse involved in creating material remains counted under sexual offenses, while later possession and circulation are counted in the CSAM category to limit double-counting.

This remains a best-estimate scenario model.