Counting Crime in America Could Get Contentious

To help fight domestic violence and other crimes, researchers need access to strong, dependable crime data. But Newsy has learned the FBI is going to stop collecting crime data for its Uniform Crime Report (UCR) from an estimated one in four police agencies across the nation.

For many years, the FBI has collected counts of different crimes from local police agencies. For homicides, however, the FBI has long encouraged reporting of expanded data for homicides that allow researchers to spot regions with disproportionate violence against certain races, genders, or ages.

This additional data also has information on the weapons used and the relationship of the victim to the killer. Newsy has learned the FBI is about to stop collecting that and other crime data from thousands of the nation’s police agencies who will miss a deadline to upgrade their crime reporting methods.

The FBI has been trying for decades to move more than 16-thousand of the nation’s law enforcement agencies over to its newest version of the Uniform Crime Report — the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The new system has been widely praised as a more detailed and transparent way of reporting crime.

“NIBRS isn’t just about names and numbers, it gives a picture of the circumstances and who the victims are,” the FBI said in a promotional video about the transition. “Our crime statistics reporting must catch up with available technology and public expectation.”

NIBRS first went online in the late 1980s. For years, many agencies resisted the change to the more detailed crime disclosures NIBRS requires.  In 2015, the FBI set a final deadline: January 1, 2021.

But as of the latest annual release of crime data the FBI made in September, covering crime in the United States for all of 2019, only 51 percent of the nation’s police agencies that participated in the UCR program submitted their data via NIBRS.

The transitions to NIBRS can often take local agencies years and can involve millions of dollars in upgrades to computer systems. The Department of Justice has made grants available to help police agencies who want to make the upgrade.

But with January fast approaching, the FBI acknowledges many agencies will likely fail to meet the deadline. Bureau officials said they would still take reports for 2020 crimes from non-NIBRS participants but said they will stop accepting the data from those agencies about any crime that takes place after January 1, 2021.

The transitions to NIBRS can often take local agencies years and can involve millions of dollars in upgrades to computer systems. The Department of Justice has made grants available to help police agencies who want to make the upgrade.

But with January fast approaching, the FBI acknowledges many agencies will likely fail to meet the deadline. Bureau officials said they would still take reports for 2020 crimes from non-NIBRS participants but said they will stop accepting the data from those agencies about any crime that takes place after January 1, 2021.

FBI officials said the strict deadline was initially set to help local agencies in their attempts to gain traction and funding needed in their communities to make the switch.

Instead of allowing local agencies who miss the deadline to continue reporting their specific crime data, the FBI is partnering with the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) to create national estimates to account for what information they will lose.

“We are forecasting that the estimates will cover approximately 25% of the law enforcement agencies in the US,” the BJS said in a statement.

Researchers say losing crime reports from any sizable number of police agencies, will create an information gap for an unknown period of time at the local level. That would make it harder to put a community’s crime risk in context with other cities or states on everything from issues with racial justice to how many police officers are assaulted in local jurisdictions.

Source: Newsy

The FBI Responds (direct quotes)

I sent two questions to the FBI asking for clarification:

First Question: We are forecasting that the estimates will cover approximately 25% of the law enforcement agencies in the US, the BJS said in a statement. But with January fast approaching, the FBI acknowledges many agencies will likely fail to meet the deadline. Bureau officials said they would still take reports for 2020 crimes from non-NIBRS participants but said they will stop accepting the data from those agencies about any crime that takes place after January 1, 2021.

There are some omissions of facts in the referenced article.

In December 2015, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) law enforcement partners recommended the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program retire the Summary Reporting System (SRS) and transition to a National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS)-only data collection by January 1, 2021.

Data received from law enforcement agencies via NIBRS will provide the law enforcement community and municipal leaders with richer, more detailed information to use in resource allocation and strategy development to most efficiently deal with crime.

To assist agencies with the transition to NIBRS, the FBI, partnered with the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) to increase the number of NIBRS participants to generate nationally representative crime statistics using NIBRS data through the National Crime Statistics Exchange (NCS-X) initiative.

The NCS-X initiative leveraged the existing infrastructure of the NIBRS to expand participation by combining data from existing NIBRS participants with data from a scientific sample of 400 additional agencies, which included 72 of the nation’s largest agencies. The FBI offered financial support to transition states and local agencies to NIBRS through this initiative.

The financial assistance supported states establishing an automated platform to collect, process, and submit NIBRS data to the FBI, or expand the capacity of an existing automated platform to collect, process, and submit NIBRS data to the FBI.

The financial assistance also supported local agencies enhancing their information systems to capture NIBRS data and/or develop technical capabilities to extract the NIBRS data from their local systems and report the information to the FBI.

Agencies may still submit SRS data to the respective state UCR program, should the state continue to accept it for state specific purposes. Agencies that do not make the January 1, 2021, deadline are encouraged to continue to work with the state UCR program to become NIBRS compliant.

As of October 1, 2020, there are 8,656 law enforcement agencies representing 46.4 percent of the population, reporting NIBRS data to the FBI via 42 NIBRS-certified state UCR programs. NIBRS implementation is underway in the remaining eight states (Alaska, California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, and New Mexico).

Based on commitments, the FBI UCR Program expects 75 percent of reporting agencies to be submitting data via the NIBRS, representing 81 percent of the United States population by 2021.

Second Question: I understand that BJS will extrapolate based on the missing agencies, but future crime reports may have issues. 

The FBI has a primary obligation to publish valid estimates for crime at the national-level for the United States. Those estimates must account for missing or incomplete information that is likely to occur in a voluntary statistical program. The FBI has a process in place to arrive at national estimates for data from the SRS and will continue this practice after the transition to NIBRS.

In addition, the FBI and the BJS are collaborating on the NIBRS NCS-X Estimation Project. The primary goal of the NIBRS NCS-X estimation methodology is to produce national estimates of offense counts and rates, and other key indicators available in NIBRS (e.g., victim and offender characteristics, weapon involvement, and location type). These estimates will address the absence of data submissions from agencies that do not participate in the FBI UCR Program or do not transition to NIBRS

With the transition from the SRS to the NIBRS, details on each single crime incident—as well as on separate offenses within the same incident—including information on victims, known offenders, relationships between victims and offenders, arrestees, and property involved in the crimes, will be collected. The NIBRS captures the traditional SRS data, specifically, the data collected via the supplementary homicide; age, sex, race, and ethnicity of persons arrested (juvenile and adult); and law enforcement officers killed and assaulted.

The NIBRS captures this information along with other incident-level data, which provides details such as when and where crime takes place, what form it takes, and the characteristics of its victims and perpetrators. The SRS provides an aggregate monthly tally of crimes.

Through the collection of detailed information on 28 crime categories containing 71 offenses and arrest-only data on 13 additional offenses using 59 data elements, NIBRS provides a more robust view of crime, as compared to SRS which collects data on 10 offenses, and arrest-only data for 21 offenses.

NIBRS also collects time of day, location types, gang involvement, types of weapons/force involved, and drug types and quantities from the incident report, to which SRS does not collect.

The richer NIBRS data will provide greater context at the national level to allow the FBI UCR Program and its contributing agencies to identify and address evolving crime issues.

NIBRS establishes a new baseline, which more precisely captures the picture of reported crime in a community.

Since 1990, the first year data was collected in the NIBRS, the FBI UCR Program has used the data elements available in the incident records to convert NIBRS data into the various SRS forms or datasets. The FBI UCR Program will continue to convert the NIBRS data to the SRS forms and datasets to maintain 10 and 20-year trends. These datasets will be available on the Crime Data Explorer, or upon request.

The FBI is working to provide the public with additional information on the NIBRS transition.