When a spate of crimes hits a community, inevitably the local media want to know if that portends some ominous trend.   One way to help answer that question is by checking general crime statistics -- which are available at a number of sites on the Internet.   They range from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports -- which provide detailed crime statistics on cities with a population of 100,000 or more -- to the National Crime Victimization Survey published by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. And many state attorneys general and local police departments post statistics on smaller communities.   The best starting point usually is the latest edition of the Uniform Crime Reports, available at the FBI's Web site.   There you'll see a listing for the preliminary 1997 report (the reports are released once a year, but there also are semiannual reports for six month periods). Usually each report has a press release that summarizes the national statistics for various crimes, including comparisons with the previous year, and a link to the full report that you can download onto your computer.   The full report is in Adobe's 'PDF' format, which means you'll need to install the Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer to view it. The reader is free for downloading at Adobe's Web site (http://www.adobe.com).   When you open the Uniform Crime Report using the Adobe Reader, you'll see national and regional statistics on the first page. Scroll down to the second page and there'll be a long alphabetical list of cities, with statistics for the past two years divided by eight specific crimes.   The numbers represent crimes reported by local police agencies to the FBI. For a detailed explanation of the UCR statistics, there's a 'Frequently Asked Questions' page at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucrquest.htm.   Besides the general UCR statistics, specialized reports are available at the FBI site on terrorism, hate crimes and the number of law enforcement officers killed or injured in the line of duty in the United States.   The UCRs posted at the FBI page only cover 1996 and 1997. If you want statistics for earlier years, there are a number of other Web sites that have excerpts or copies of older reports.   One is AccessAtlanta (http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/crime/index.html), run by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which has Uniform Crime Report data going back to 1993. Just click on a state and then on a city, and the crime numbers will be displayed in an easy-to-read chart.   The University of Virginia's Social Sciences Data Center has an online database of UCR statistics down to the county level going back to 1990. That database is at http://fisher.lib.Virginia.EDU/crime/.   A word of caution: There were significant changes in the way crimes were reported in 1994 that make comparisons of recent numbers with data before 1994 very problematic. The changes are described at the Data Center page.   Yet another site -- The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data -- has Uniform Crime Reports dating back to 1975 that you can download onto your computer. The archive is at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/NACJD/ucr.html.   And at the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics site you can download UCR reports for each state dating back to 1966. Those reports are at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/datast.htm.   The files at these latter two sites are available in a variety of formats and can be extremely confusing unless you are familiar with databases. So you'll probably want someone on your staff who uses database programs to help you figure out which files to download and how to open them on your computer.   Another prime source of crime data is the National Crime Victimization Survey conducted annually by the U.S. Justice Department.   Rather than relying on what crimes are reported to police, as the UCR does, this report is based on surveys of people in which they are asked whether they were victims of particular crimes. As a result, the survey may yield different numbers for 'underreported' crimes in which victims may have been reluctant to go to the police.   Information from the latest survey for 1996, along with a variety of other survey data collected since 1973, is available at the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cvictgen.htm. Unlike the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, only national statistics, not numbers for cities or counties, are available from the survey.   Besides the federal government, state law enforcement agencies often compile their own crime statistics.   In California, the Attorney General's office issues a semiannual report on crime that includes cities and counties of 100,000 people or more. The most recent report for the first six months of 1998 is available online at http://caag.state.ca.us/cjsc/pubsol.htm. There is also a special study of hate crimes posted there. As with the UCRs, the reports are in PDF format and thus have to be downloaded onto your computer and opened with Adobe Acrobat Reader.   New York has statewide and regional arrest statistics through early 1998 (http://criminaljustice.state.ny.us/crimnet/ojsa/cjdata.htm), along with a database that allows you to retrieve crime statistics for individual counties from 1980 to 1996 (http://criminaljustice.state.ny.us/crimnet/ojsa/areastat/areast.htm).   Other states publish reports on specific types of criminal activity. Texas has a report on gangs at http://www.oag.state.tx.us/WEBSITE/CRIMINAL/98juvjustice.htm, while Florida has a report on hate crimes at http://legal.firn.edu/justice/97hate.htm.   Check the home page of your state attorney general to see what's available.   You also can try the Web site for your local police department, many of which have put city crime data online. To cite just a few examples: Berkeley, California's Crime Information Web site (http://www.inBerkeley2.ci.berkeley.ca.us/crimeinfo) has tables of crime data and a map that displays the crime rate on every block in the city. The Moab, Utah Police Department (http://www.sisna.com/moabpd/indexns.html) has four years of city crime statistics and even publishes a version of the weekly police blotter as it appears in the local newspaper. Topeka, Kansas has monthly totals for crimes in that city (http://topeka.wuacc.edu/crimcomp.htm). If you're not sure if your police department has a Web site, try the Police Officer's Internet Directory at http://www.officer.com/agencies.htm. It has links to police agency Web pages in the United States and around the world.   Some types of crimes may not be listed in the various reports I've mentioned thus far, but they are available at Web sites of particular law enforcement agencies. For example: Bombings: The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms compiles statistics on bombings in a series of reports available at http://www.atf.treas.gov/core/explarson/information/stats.htm. The FBI's Bomb Data Center also tracks bombing trends at http://www.fbi.gov/lab/bomsum/1995stat.htm. Drugs: The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration publishes some reports on drug use and arrests at http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/drugdata/stats.htm. Illegal Immigrants: The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has statistics on the number of people illegally residing in the United States. That page is at http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/stats/illegalalien/index.html. Or you can try the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, an annual publication that collects most of the crime data compiled by various federal agencies. The sourcebook is available online with a search engine that allows you to type in the name of a crime to retrieve sections of the report with statistical tables on that crime. The searchable version of the sourcebook is available at http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/1995/search.html.   And for a comprehensive listing of all the various sources of crime statistics, go to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service's (NCJRS) page of links at http://www.ncjrs.org/statwww.htm.   At the NCJRS page you'll also find links for international crime data, such as the United Nations World Crime Surveys at  (although the most recent survey posted is eight-years-old).   One final caveat: As I noted in the Uniform Crime Reports section, changes and difficulties in gathering and reporting crime statistics can affect their reliability, particularly if you are tracking crime rates over a period of time or trying to compare one city's rate with another. So you should contact an expert on the statistics to make sure you use them properly in a story.