Update-The FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System Greatly Improves

Update-The FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System Greatly Improves

Highlights

We are on the verge of a new and better way of analyzing crime data through the FBI’s emerging National Incident-Based Reporting System. But issues remain. 

A podcast of this article is available via YouTube.

Author

Leonard Adam Sipes, Jr.

Former Senior Specialist for Crime Prevention and Statistics for the Department of Justice’s clearinghouse. Former Director of Information Services, National Crime Prevention Council. Former Adjunct Associate Professor of Criminology and Public Affairs-University of Maryland, University College. Former police officer. Retired federal senior spokesperson.

Former advisor to presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. Former advisor to the “McGruff-Take a Bite Out of Crime” national media campaign. Produced successful state anti-crime media campaigns.

Thirty-five years of directing award-winning (50+) public relations for national and state criminal justice agencies. Interviewed thousands of times by every national news outlet, often with a focus on crime statistics and research. Created the first state and federal podcasting series. Produced a unique and emulated style of government proactive public relations. 

Certificate of Advanced Study-The Johns Hopkins University. 

Author of ”Success With The Media: Everything You Need To Survive Reporters and Your Organization” available at Amazon and additional booksellers.

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A comprehensive overview of crime for recent years is available at Violent and Property Crime Rates In The U.S. 

Background

Background on the FBI’s “new” National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is available here. It’s a major improvement in the delivery and analysis of crime in the United States. The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is part of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program.

The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program began in January 1930.  The International Association Of Chiefs Of Police formed the Committee on Uniform Crime Records to develop a system for reporting crime data during the 1920s. In 1929, the committee developed a plan for crime reporting that included standardized offense definitions.

 

The Department of Justice provided millions of dollars to help local law enforcement implement the NIBRS. It’s designed to collect more crime data and analyze it in a way that promotes a better understanding of crime trends. With a better understanding comes more strategic solutions.

 

Please note that the Summary Reporting System (SRS) is the FBI’s old method of collecting crime numbers. Current reports combine the SRS and the NIBRS from the nation’s 19,000 law enforcement agencies. Participation by police agencies is voluntary.

 

The FBI continues its SRS policy of only counting the most serious crimes, not all crimes collected for its crime reports. 

 

The National Incident-Based Reporting System will be a dramatic improvement to our understanding of reported crime and the circumstances of the crime (including offender information). It greatly enhances our ability to understand crime. The FBI is starting to offer monthly and quarterly reports instead of waiting till the end of the year to release data.

 

This is all good news “if” you understand what’s included and unresolved issues.

 

Article

 

Those of us interested in crime and justice issues have always wished for a more comprehensive analysis of data collected by the FBI. The FBI is now fully implementing the National Incident-Based Reporting System, an endeavor that has been in the planning stages for decades. It includes multiple crimes per incident rather than listing one primary crime under the older Summary Reporting System.

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The NIBRS:

 

Provides greater specificity in reporting offenses. Not only does NIBRS look at all of the offenses within an incident, but it also looks at many more offenses than the traditional SRS does. NIBRS collects data for 52 offenses, plus 10 additional offenses for which only arrests are reported. SRS counts limited data for 10 offenses and 20 additional crimes for which only arrests are reported.

Collects more detailed information, including incident date and time, whether reported offenses were attempted or completed, expanded victim types, relationships of victims to offenders and offenses, demographic details, location data, property descriptions, drug types and quantities, the offender’s suspected use of drugs or alcohol, the involvement of gang activity, and whether a computer was used in the commission of the crime.

Helps give context to specific crime problems such as drug/narcotics and sex offenses, as well as issues like animal cruelty, identity theft, and computer hacking.

Provides greater analytic flexibility. Through NIBRS, data users can see many more facets of crime, as well as relationships and connections among these facets, than SRS provides.

Issues

The problem has been the participation of law enforcement agencies. There have been calendar years using NIBRS data where the percentage of participating police agencies has been limited.

Because the NIBRS collects multiple crimes per incident instead of one primary crime, many suggest that law enforcement agencies have been reluctant to participate out of fear that the FBI would indicate rising crime for participating jurisdictions. For the moment, the FBI is continuing its policy of offering one crime per incident for its reports.

The other concern is that the vast majority of crimes are not reported to law enforcement. Collectively, that means millions of crimes are not included in FBI national reports.

The FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics suggest that only 10 percent of incidents have more than one crime. Data indicates that it’s considerably more than ten percent.

There are approximately 19,000 police departments nationwide, and participation is voluntary. The FBI and the Office of Justice Programs within the US Department of Justice have poured millions of dollars into assisting state and local agencies to support their conversion and adoption of the National Incident-Based Reporting System. This also applies to state crime repositories; local agencies submit data to statewide repositories who then provide data to the FBI. 

Forty-nine states have their own Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, which collects crime data from local law enforcement agencies and sends it to the FBI. Agencies can also submit data directly to the FBI’s UCR Program.

To gain a better understanding of the progress of the implementation and adoption of the National Incident-Based Information System, I asked the FBI to answer an array of questions:

Questions And Answers From The FBI

Question: What percentage of law enforcement agencies are providing crime statistics to the FBI?

 

Answer: Currently, 86.1% of agencies are providing data to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program either through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) or the Summary Reporting System (SRS). For Crime in the Nation, 2023, 85.2% of agencies reported data. 

 

Question: What percentage of law enforcement agencies are exclusively using NIBRS?

 

Answer: As of December 2, 2024, 74.4 percent of agencies are reporting NIBRS data.

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Question: What percentage of law enforcement agencies are providing full month data for monthly NIBRS reports? Same question for quarterly reports. 

 

Answer: 79.4 percent of law enforcement agencies are providing full-month data for monthly and quarterly NIBRS reports.

 

Question: What percentage of law enforcement agencies are waiting until the end of the year to provide crime statistics?

 

Answer: 13.8 percent of law enforcement agencies provide their crime data at the end of the year.

 

Question: How many individual crimes are being collected by NIBRS? Different sources provide different answers. Per the UCR, the FBI only reported the primary offense, correct?

 

Answer: Law enforcement agencies submitting NIBRS data can report up to 10 offenses in a single incident.  Within NIBRS, there are 28 offense categories made up of 71 specific crimes. 

 

Agencies reporting data via SRS apply the hierarchy rule and report only the most serious offense. For SRS, monthly aggregate counts are collected for 10 offenses. NIBRS data releases include all reported offenses, up to 10, per incident. 

 

NIBRS tables are available on the FBI’s UCR Program Crime Data Explorer website. Crime in the United States and the quarterly releases of data included the SRS data and the converted NIBRS data (the hierarchy rule was applied and only the most serious offense was counted).

      

Question: Some in law enforcement suggest that the collection of numerous individual crimes via the NIBRS is impeding the full cooperation of police agencies. Are there reports addressing this? 

 

Answer: To address this concern, in 2019, the FBI’s UCR Program did a study, Effects of NIBRS on Crime Statistics, 2019, that showed nearly 90 percent of the incidents submitted to the FBI’s UCR Program involved only one offense.  The remaining incidents included more than one offense. The study is available on the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer. Visit the Crime page, scroll down to Resources, and select Effects of NIBRS on Crime Data. 

 

Question: Are all reported crimes from law enforcement (not just the primary offense) being offered in FBI monthly, quarterly, and full-year reports?

 

Answer: The NIBRS reports available on the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer website include the offenses, up to 10, reported. Data released as part of the Crime in the United States and the quarterly data releases include the SRS data and converted NIBRS data (the hierarchy rule is applied to NIBRS data and only the most serious offense is counted). 

 

Summation

 

74.4 percent of police agencies are reporting NIBRS data. Approximately 82% of the US population is covered by police agencies using the National Incident-Based Reporting System.

 

79.4 percent of law enforcement agencies are providing full month data for monthly and quarterly NIBRS reports which is wonderful news given that many agencies used to “dump” their data at the end of the year. Now,13.8 percent of law enforcement agencies are doing this.

 

The Summary Reporting System (SRS) was the traditional way of collecting and reporting crime statistics in the U.S., where law enforcement agencies provided summary data instead of detailed records of individual incidents. Law enforcement agencies submitted a monthly count of crimes that occurred in their jurisdictions.

 

These are aggregate totals, meaning they represent the total number of reported offenses without specific details about each incident. These counts provide a high-level summary of crime trends, though they lack the detailed incident-level information that newer systems, like the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) collect.

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Conclusions

 

The National Incident-Based Reporting System is a massive undertaking requiring decades of effort to get local law enforcement agencies to embrace new data reporting requirements.

 

Considering that police agencies are being hammered by the loss of thousands of cops per the Bureau of Labor Statistics (there are cities with over 1,000 police officers below authorized strength), and we recently went through a “defund the police” movement and issues with the police use of force, the fact that the vast majority of law enforcement agencies are participating in the NIBRS representing the great majority of the American public is a significant accomplishment.

 

No, I’m not fond of the way the FBI reports crime data. Their primary portal is confusing. It requires downloads instead of simply presenting data. It’s hard to navigate. It’s not proactively sending out notices of new crime reports. Headings for spreadsheets need to be more specific as to what it includes and excludes. This needs to change.

 

The Bureau Of Justice Statistics (a partner of the FBI in creating the NIBRS) through their National Crime Victimization Survey offers similar information on crime and the characteristics of crime. The FBI relies on reported crime whereas the 50-year-old National Crime Victimization Survey is a gauge of all crime except homicides (you can’t interview dead people) and business crime. While most years find the two counts of crime somewhat similar, recent data indicates reduced crime via the FBI while the National Crime Victimization Survey reports the nation’s highest rate of violent crime ever for its latest reports in 2022 and 2023.

 

It would be really interesting if the US Department of Justice combined both reports. Those of us writing about crime are not very good at explaining why crime goes up or down. Doing a deep dive into multiple crime statistics may give us a better understanding of the characteristics of crime which can lead to better crime prevention and analysis solutions.

 

It seems fundamentally wrong that we know so little as to why violent crime is both up (by record amounts via the National Crime Victimization Survey) and down through crimes reported to law enforcement compiled by the FBI. It can’t be both. If crime is down in some cities and up in others, is there an explanation? Can NIBRS data combined with National Crime Victimization Survey observations give us unique insights that have eluded us for decades?

 

The President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice was established in 1967 with a promise of a new day of crime research and understanding. Simply put, that hasn’t happened. We had a 20-year-plus decline in crime (until 2012) yet there wasn’t a criminologist in the country that could tell you why with certainty. 

 

But in the final analysis, the FBI, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the Office of Justice Programs of the US Department of Justice are on the verge of implementing a thorough analysis of reported (not all) crime. This process has taken decades and millions of dollars to implement. 

 

The FBI and allied agencies should be proud of a very complex undertaking with participating law enforcement agencies. When fully implemented, it will be of service to the crime prevention and analysis communities. 

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