5. Governance and Funding
A variety of federal agencies collect crime-related data across multiple departments, but the Executive Branch lacks a structure for coordinating these efforts. Years of underfunding have made it difficult for the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) to perform its mandated functions.
The FBI currently collects information on crimes reported to law enforcement from state UCR program offices and, in some cases, directly from federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies. It then shares this information through the CDE, press releases, and an annual report. The FBI has deep relationships with state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies and with state UCR programs. As a result, it is well-positioned to support the collection of NIBRS data. However, as the FBI is primarily an investigative and intelligence agency, and not a recognized federal statistical agency, it is less suited to data analysis and reporting.
As the federal statistical agency for criminal justice, BJS is statutorily empowered to “compile, collate, analyze, publish, and disseminate uniform national statistics concerning all aspects of criminal justice and … crime….”55 Its staff have the expertise to gather and conduct sophisticated statistical analyses of data from NIBRS, NCVS, and other sources. In addition, unifying the public presentation of crime trends data at BJS would minimize the chances of the federal government publishing conflicting information while creating more of a one-stop shop for understanding the full picture of crime in America.
Absence of an Overarching Governance Structure for Crime Data Collection and Reporting
The lack of a federal governance structure for justice data collection and reporting has hampered the nation’s access to timely, accurate, complete, and usable crime trends data and analysis. The vast majority of national crime trends statistics are collected and distributed by two federal agencies: the FBI and BJS. The FBI collects and reports through the UCR Program/NIBRS and BJS reports on NIBRS and collects and reports on NCVS. The CDC shares information on intentional injuries and firearm-related homicide from NVDRS and from other health surveillance tools like FASTER: AVERT and NEISS-FISS. The result is that information is siloed: The media and policymakers focus on UCR Program data, criminological and other social science researchers use NIBRS and NCVS, and public health researchers focus on violent injury and death data from CDC sources.
Other federal agencies also collect data and produce statistics about crime trends:
- The Environmental Protection Agency reports on violations of regulations and environmental crimes.
- The Securities and Exchange Commission reports on financial crimes and violations of securities law.
- The U.S. Secret Service reports on financial crimes including counterfeiting and identity theft.
- The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a branch of the U.S. Treasury Department, reports on money laundering tied to criminal and terrorist activity.
- The Federal Trade Commission reports on consumer fraud and identity theft.
- The U.S. Postal Inspection Service reports on mail fraud and related crimes.
No federal agency currently compiles time series data from these various sources.
Lack of Coordination Between Agencies
In their 2018 report, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s National Research Council56 concluded that there is “neither a strong coordinating body nor a defined governance structure for the whole U.S. crime statistics enterprise.” The National Research Council recommended that the Office of Management and Budget “explore the range of coordination and governance processes for the complete U.S. crime statistics enterprise—including the ‘new’ crime categories—and then establish such a structure.”
To date, no such structure has been put in place. A variety of federal agencies across multiple departments currently collect crime-related data, but the Executive Branch still lacks a structure for coordinating these efforts. This creates significant hurdles for those seeking to link crime, health, and economic data to inform policy and budget decisions.
A Small and Stagnant Budget
Although BJS is the principal federal agency responsible for collecting, analyzing, publishing, and disseminating information on crime, criminal offenders, victims of crime, and the operations of the criminal justice system at all levels of government, it receives one of the smallest base appropriations from Congress of any principal statistical agency. In FY 2024, BJS received a $35- million base appropriation from Congress, significantly less than the President’s $78 million request and a decrease from FY 2023’s $42 million. For FY 2025, the President’s budget proposed $42 million in base funding for BJS.57 In contrast, the Bureau of Labor Statistics received an appropriation of $698 million in FY 2024. And that same year, Congress appropriated $307 million to the National Center for Education Statistics, $187 million to the National Center for Health Statistics, and $188 million to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.58
Years of underfunding—punctuated by occasional budget cuts—have made it difficult for BJS to perform its mandated functions.59 BJS has not conducted the Survey of Local Jail Inmates since 2002 or the Survey of Prison Inmates since 2016. These surveys provide valuable insights into crime trends and how people acquire firearms used in crime.
The Office of Justice Programs, administered under the U.S. Department of Justice, has attempted to compensate for these cuts by transferring funds to BJS to support their work.60 Yet rising costs, particularly for the implementation of the labor-intensive NCVS, which now exceed $60 million a year,61 have limited the ability of BJS to support state and local criminal justice agencies and forced it to pull back from fielding surveys of people in prisons, which provide valuable insights into emerging crime trends and the operations of the justice system. Budget limitations also have impeded BJS’s efforts to gather information on the operations of the courts and other important parts of the criminal justice system. Funding levels must increase for the nation to have access to high-quality, rigorous analyses of timely, accurate, and complete crime trends data.
The Process for Revising and Updating NIBRS
NIBRS also faces governance challenges, especially the update of NIBRS. Proposals to edit or expand NIBRS must be considered and reviewed by the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division’s Advisory Policy Board (APB). The APB is responsible for reviewing several programs, including the UCR Program, for policy, technical, and operational issues, and making recommendations to the FBI director.62 The overwhelming majority of APB recommendations, including recommendations to update NIBRS, are approved by the FBI director. The FBI then develops specifications that it shares with state UCR programs, which, in turn, provide guidance to records management system software vendors. All of this requires coordination across multiple federal and state entities.63 Based on the complexity of the process, the movement from proposal to implementation is slow, often spanning years.
Since 2020, the APB has made more than 30 NIBRS-related recommendations that have been approved by the FBI director but have not yet resulted in technical specifications.64 How the FBI is prioritizing these recommendations is unclear. Some state UCR program managers told the Working Group that they were unsure which APB recommendations were moving forward and when new data elements would be included in future iterations of the technical specifications.65 For example, the APB recently approved a measure to add additional data elements to distinguish between shootings and other firearms assaults (e.g., pistol-whipping), identify whether the victim(s) sustained an injury, and determine whether a firearm was brandished. But even if the FBI prioritized producing technical specifications to implement this recommendation, the change would not be reflected in records management systems for years.
While some long-term participants in the APB see the process for updating NIBRS as one that is necessary to thoroughly vet proposals, the current process for updating NIBRS has limited policymakers’ ability to develop and implement responsive, data-driven violence prevention strategies in a timely fashion. Between 2019 and 2023, for example, the rate of firearm assaults rose 32% in 11 American cities, yet national or nationally representative data on the nature of these assaults–including whether anyone was shot during them–were not available to local law enforcement, policymakers, the media, or the public.
Adding data elements to the NIBRS data collection can pose significant challenges to law enforcement agencies. While many local law enforcement agencies are now including provisions for NIBRS upgrades in their contracts with records management system vendors, the costs to large vendors for customizing upgrades for multiple states can be significant. Upgrading records management systems is just one of the costs associated with NIBRS reporting. Unlike some other complex national data collection series,66 NIBRS reporting is voluntary (for those not in federal agencies) and uncompensated.
