What Can FBI Data Say About Crime in 2021? It's Too Unreliable to Tell

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The Marshall Project
@MarshallProj
👋 Hey, I'm @Weihua_Li1. After the FBI revised its crime data collection system in 2021, nearly 40% of police agencies didn't successfully submit crime data to the database.

For @MarshallProj & w @Axios Local, we dig into what the missing data means.

themarshallproject.org
What Can FBI Data Say About Crime in 2021? It’s Too Unreliable to Tell
The transition to a new data system creates huge gaps in national crime stats sure to be exploited by politicians in this election year.
2:57 PM · Jun 14, 2022

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/06/14/what-did-fbi-data-say-about-crime-in-2021-it-s-too-unreliable-to-tell

Nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country did not submit any data in 2021 to a newly revised FBI crime statistics collection program, leaving a massive gap in information sure to be exploited by politicians in midterm election campaigns already dominated by public fear over a rise in violent crime.

The gap includes the nation’s two largest cities by population, New York City and Los Angeles, as well as most agencies in five of the six most populous states: California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Download the agency participation data used in this piece.

In 2021, the FBI retired its nearly century-old national crime data collection program, the Summary Reporting System used by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. The agency switched to a new system, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which gathers more specific information on each incident. Even though the FBI announced the transition years ago and the federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help local police make the switch, about 7,000 of the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies did not successfully send crime data to the voluntary program last year.

By contrast, in 2020, around 2,700 agencies did not report crime data to the FBI. (In some cases, an agency will submit data, but the FBI rejects it.)Since 1930, the nation has relied on the FBI’s data collection to understand how crime is changing, such as how many murders or rapes took place last year, which city had the highest murder rate, or how many people were arrested.

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