Texas Department of Public Safety

Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, as defined in the UCR program, is the willful killing of one human being by another. This offense category includes any death resulting from a fight, argument, quarrel, assault or commission of a crime. Attempted murder and assaults with the intent to kill are not counted as murder, but are included in UCR as aggravated assaults. Suicides, accidental deaths, and justifiable homicides are also excluded from the murder classification. The classification of this offense, as well as for all Index Crimes, is based solely on police investigation and not upon determinations by courts, medical examiners, coroners, juries, or other judicial bodies.

The Texas Hate Crimes Act, Chapter 411.046 of the Texas Government Code, defines hate crimes as crimes that are motivated by prejudice, hatred, or advocacy of violence including, but not limited to, incidents for which statistics are or were kept under Public Law 101-275 (the Federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act). The federal law further defines Hate Crime as crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, disability, gender and gender identity

In response to a growing concern about sexual assault incidents, the 80th Texas Legislative Session passed HB 76. The Bill requires the Texas DPS to establish guidelines and collect, as part of the UCR Program, data about incidents that contain specific sexual assault offenses. Sexual Assault crime data collection was required to begin in calendar year 2008. Special consideration had to be taken to disseminate the data collection guidelines for Sexual Assault reporting due to the nature of the difference between UCR offense definitions and Texas penal code definitions. In the Texas UCR program, rape is the only offense collected under the crime index. Because there is greater variance in the offenses collected in the compilation of Sexual Assault data, this data collection should in no way be compared to the statistics maintained in the UCR Program.