You live in the most dangerous state in America.

Or, maybe not.

When HomeShield Security, a company that sells security alarms, released their rankings of the most dangerous cities by using data from the 2012 Uniform Crime Report compiled annually by the FBI, they titled Knoxville as the fifth most dangerous city in Tennessee, following Crossville as number one and Memphis as number three.

“If you just look at the list, its laughable,” said Darrell Debusk, Knoxville Police Department’s public information officer. “You’ve got to remember who is doing this … How do you sell alarms? You make people scared.”

While this list may be laughable, these rankings underscore a decade-old debate about the way crime statistics are reported in the U.S.

In 1999, the FBI announced they were switching to an entirely new system for law enforcement agencies to report their crime statistics. They had originally been using Uniform Crime Reports to consolidate crime report numbers, but decided to transition into a more detailed, comprehensive methodology known as the National Incident-Based Reporting System, or NIBRS.

While the UCR categorizes crime into eight indexes, NIBRS is more detailed, with 22 categories including information on the victim, offender and specific location. For example, while rape is one category under the UCR, it is split into three, more specified categories in NIBRS.

Since 1999, 15 states have transferred to the NIBRS system, including Tennessee. Of the 15, three were ranked in the top 10 most dangerous states in America by the Law Street Journal. Delaware was ranked number six, South Carolina number five and Tennessee number one. Since Tennessee switched to incident-based reporting in 2001, it has been consistently at the top of these rankings.

“When you’re just comparing these raw numbers, you see any number of organizations trying to determine where is safe and where isn’t,” said Marshall Stone, supervisory special agent for FBI Knoxville. “We take it for what it is with raw numbers. You wouldn’t compare a state that reports with more detailed information to one that’s not … It’s not apples to apples.”

While the divide exists between states who report generic numbers to the UCR and others report more detailed information to NIBRS, fairly comparing crime across states and cities is impossible.

“We are not accurately tracking crime in this country,” Debusk said, who expressed irritation with the FBI for not better enforcing a change-over to NIBRS reporting. Until all states change over, he called the UCR numbers “useless.”

“This (system) puts any state reporting incident based crimes automatically at a disadvantage.”

Debusk said if he responds to a situation where a perpetrator has broken into a house, raped a victim, stolen a TV and car before fleeing the scene, a Tennessee agency would report four crimes. Another state, not reporting to an incident-based system, would report one crime: the rape.

“These numbers across states should not be compared; they can’t be and they shouldn’t be,” Debusk said. “Until (states) switch over, there are always gong to be these problems … It’s just not fair to the agencies that are doing the incident based reporting system.”

UCR data is currently available for the 2012 year, while NIBRS data is available for the first half of 2013. To view the data, visit.