About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

1 1 (May 24, 2022)

handle is hein.crs/govefva0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Congressional SResearch Service NIBRS Participation Rates and Federal Crime Data Quality May 24, 2022 Since 1930, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI's) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program has collected and published annual crime data. These data are typically delayed by about nine months, and since 2020 the FBI has also released quarterly crime data. Although the release of 2021 crime data is not anticipated until late summer or fall 2022, data for the first quarter of 2021 was expected to be released in early 2022. However, the FBI has announced that due to low participation rates it was unable to release all of the quarterly 2021 crime data. The FBI stated that it was not releasing the expected quarterly data due to agency participation falling below a 60% participation threshold. For 2021, the FBI has received data from 9,881 of the 18,818 law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in the country (53%). Because this falls short of the 60% threshold, the FBI released 2021 quarterly data from individual city agencies with populations of 100,000 or greater but stated that it would not release data by region or aggregate population. The FBI plans to release the full year of 2021 data with confidence intervals to indicate a lack of precision in the data; however, the FBI said it would not publish percentage change estimates or compare estimates to prior years. The FBI further stated that it will not release state-level estimates if the participating LEAs in a state cover less than 80% of the state population. Given these participation rates, Congress may consider a range of options to expand implementation of the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The National Incident-Based Reporting System The UCR program collects voluntarily submitted crime data from federal, state, local, and tribal LEAs. Previously, the FBI used the Summary Reporting System (SRS) to collect these data; however, on January 1, 2021, the FBI retired the SRS program in favor of NIBRS. The shift to NIBRS is expected to yield many benefits, including improved reliability, accuracy, accessibility, and timeliness of national crime data. NIBRS captures a larger variety of crimes and more details about each incident (e.g., the time of day) than did SRS. Perhaps most notably, NIBRS eliminated the hierarchy rule, which under SRS required an LEA to report only the most serious offense if an incident included several crimes. In contrast, NIBRS allows law enforcement to report up to 10 co-occurring offenses per single incident. In a 2018 guidance document, the FBI estimated that it would take individual LEAs up to two years to transition from SRS to NIBRS. NIBRS is more complicated than SRS and the conversion may require Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov IN11936 CRS INSIGHT Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most