Critical Releases in Homeland Security: December 1, 2010

"In accordance with our mandate, this Report, which is current as of October 29, includes detailed treatment of our investigations of the areas identified by Congress for our examination and recommendation. These areas are:" Proliferation Practices, Economic Transfers, Energy, United States Capital Markets, Regional Economic and Security Impacts, United States-China Bilateral Programs, World Trade Organization Compliance, and Freedom of Expression.

This entry provides an interactive resource for practitioners regarding hate crime statistics for 2009 in the United States. "The FBI's [Federal Bureau of Investigation] UCR [Uniform Crime Reporting] Program is a nationwide, cooperative statistical effort of nearly 18,000 city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies voluntarily reporting data on crimes brought to their attention. Since 1930, the FBI has administered the UCR Program and continued to assess and monitor the nature and type of crime in the Nation. The program's primary objective is to generate reliable information for use in law enforcement administration, operation, and management; however, its data have over the years become one of the country's leading social indicators. Criminologists, sociologists, legislators, municipal planners, the media, and other students of criminal justice use the data for varied research and planning purposes. In 2009, law enforcement agencies active in the UCR Program represented more than 295 million United States inhabitants-96.3 percent of the total population. The coverage amounted to 97.1 percent of the population in Metropolitan Statistical Areas, 90.9 percent of the population in cities outside metropolitan areas, and 93.0 percent of the population in nonmetropolitan counties."

"The nation's transportation and water infrastructure--its highways, airports, water supply systems, wastewater treatment plants, and other facilities--plays a vital role in the economy. Private commercial activities and the daily lives of individuals depend on that physical infrastructure, which is provided by all levels of government in the United States. Concerns about the nation's infrastructure and its ability to support commerce and promote public well-being have prompted calls for greater infrastructure spending. The Congress is currently considering the level of funding for the next several years for important federal infrastructure programs, such as highways, mass transit, and aviation. Crucial to such decisionmaking is information about how much the federal government and state and local governments have spent over time to build, improve, and rehabilitate physical infrastructure, as well as to operate and maintain existing facilities. In response to a request from the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Finance, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) prepared this study, which analyzes recent developments in spending on transportation and water infrastructure, trends in spending for capital and for operations and maintenance by the various levels of government, and the rationale for public spending on infrastructure. This study updates a previous report that CBO published in August 2007, Trends in Public Spending on Transportation and Water Infrastructure, 1956 to 2004. In keeping with CBO's mandate to provide objective, impartial analysis, this report makes no recommendations."