3. Completeness
There has been significant progress in transitioning law enforcement agencies to the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS), but substantial obstacles to generating a more comprehensive view of American crime remain. These include achieving full NIBRS coverage, effectively tracking non-fatal firearms assaults and injuries data, and expanding coverage of other important types of crime, such as white-collar, environmental, and cybercrimes, that are not captured well by existing systems.
Under the UCR Summary Reporting System, national reporting of crime data by law enforcement agencies typically covered 98% of the total population.31 While the percentage of Americans living in jurisdictions that report to NIBRS has risen significantly in recent years, from 57% in 2020 to 83% at the end of 2024,32 NIBRS coverage is still below levels reached by the Summary Reporting System. Substantial obstacles to generating a more comprehensive view of American crime remain, including the challenges related to the NIBRS transition, effectively tracking non-fatal firearms assault and injury data, and expanding data collection to cover other important types of crime, such as white collar, environmental, and cybercrimes, that are not captured well by existing systems.
A Changing Path
In 2012, BJS funded the creation of the National Crime Statistics Exchange (NCS-X)33 to explore whether it was possible to use NIBRS data to produce accurate, national estimates of reported crime that included incident-level details and characteristics. Working closely with the FBI, BJS determined that it was possible to produce accurate results on crime trends from a sample of 400 carefully selected jurisdictions.34 A joint effort was launched to help these 400 agencies transition to NIBRS with the ultimate goal of constructing a weighted sample that would allow for the generation of nationally representative estimates of crime trends. A few years later, however, the FBI appeared to have changed its emphasis.
In December 2015, then-FBI Director James Comey announced that the FBI would transition all reporting from the Summary Reporting System to NIBRS by January 1, 2021.35 The switch to NIBRS aimed to enhance the completeness, as well as the timeliness and accuracy, of available crime data nationwide and provide the FBI and other users with a greater ability to identify, understand, and address evolving crime issues.36 But the announcement also created new challenges. Instead of focusing on helping 400 agencies transition to NIBRS as part of the NCX-S effort, the task became to transition all U.S. law enforcement agencies to NIBRS.
Unlike the aggregate-level data available through the Summary Reporting System, NIBRS provides more detailed information, including expanded crime types and offense categories, characteristics of each crime and whether multiple crimes occurred during the same incident, profiles of both victims and offenders, the type and value of any property lost, and whether the case was cleared by law enforcement. Like earlier data from the Summary Reporting System, NIBRS data are standardized to facilitate comparisons across jurisdictions, enhancing the capacity for users to conduct strategic analyses to amplify prevention and intervention strategies.37
When the transition was announced in 2015, NIBRS covered approximately 36% of the population. Early in the transition, large cities experienced the lowest compliance rates; by 2022, however, smaller cities were still struggling with the transition (Figure 3).38
While there has been significant progress in onboarding agencies to the new system, particularly in the past year, the transition to NIBRS remains incomplete. The New York Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department recently began reporting to NIBRS; high-population states like California, Florida, and Pennsylvania, however, continue to lag. In April 2024, NIBRS reporting covered 83% of the population.
To better understand the obstacles to sustaining the transition to NIBRS, the Working Group held a series of interviews with the executive committee of the Association of State UCR Programs, state UCR program managers, and local law enforcement representatives from seven states that varied in geography, population size, and the types of active law enforcement agencies.39 States that successfully transitioned to NIBRS, in general, provided adequate funding to their state UCR programs and used federal grants to provide local agencies with technical assistance and innovative tools such as a low- or no-cost records management system. Many of the states that transitioned to NIBRS also enacted statutes that required local law enforcement agencies to submit incident-level data on a timely basis. States that had been less successful in the transition to NIBRS typically underfunded state UCR programs, failed to help local law enforcement agencies navigate a sometimes confusing software vendor landscape, and lacked statutes mandating NIBRS reporting.
Other Types of Crime
As was the case with the Summary Reporting System before it, most of the offenses in NIBRS are physical crimes against people, property, and society.40 Other types of offenses that have a significant impact on American families, society, and communities receive less attention. These include intellectual property theft, crimes committed online, crimes against animals, environmental crimes, campaign finance and elections offenses, securities fraud, embezzlement, and other forms of white-collar crime.41
Varying amounts of information about these categories of crime are available from other sources, but their exclusion from the two major Justice Department reports, Crime in the Nation42 and Criminal Victimization,43 limits understanding of the full nature and extent of crime in the country. That, in turn, can distort enforcement and prevention priorities across state, local, tribal, and federal agencies.
