Measuring Crime Reported to Law Enforcement using NIBRS Data

Welcome to Justice Today, the official podcast of the Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs, where we shine a light on cutting-edge research and practices and offer an in-depth look at what we're doing to meet the biggest public safety challenges of our time. Join us as we explore how funding science and technology help us achieve strong communities.

During today's podcast we are talking about the National Incident-Based Reporting System otherwise known as NIBRS. My name is Meredith Tibbetts, and I'll be your host.

With us today is Edward Abraham, Unit Chief of the Crime and Law Enforcement Statistics Unit at the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division. Also with us is Erica Smith, Unit Chief overseeing the law enforcement incident-based statistics unit at the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Thank you both for joining us.  

NIBRS was developed in the 1980s to meet the needs of law enforcement in the 21st century and to improve the overall quality of crime data collected by law enforcement. And unlike data that was reported through the UCR program's traditional summary reporting system, or SRS, which was an aggregate monthly tally of crimes, NIBRS collects 47 more offenses and more detailed victim, offender, arrestee, and property data on each single crime occurrence. It goes much deeper because of the ability to provide circumstances and context for crimes like location, time of day, and whether the incident was cleared. 

In addition, NIBRS provides greater analytic flexibility. Through NIBRS, data users can see more facets of crime as well as the relationships and connections among these facets. The NIBRS standards include a series of added capabilities which ensure that data is reported correctly, and these edits ensure accurate initial data entry and easier offense classification. 

In the NIBRS, updated information is available with and directly tied to the original incident. It is these richer details about crime that NIBRS provides which resulted in the FBI making the transition to a NIBRS-only data collection in January of 2021. 

NIBRS is collected by each local law enforcement agency, and the data can be examined at that jurisdictional level. So in addition, data can be aggregated to examine crime within counties and even within states individually. These different levels of geographical aggregation provide an opportunity to really examine crime within the context of place, and to see how other measures of public safety and community wellness are correlated with crime. 

And as Ed mentioned, the level of detail in NIBRS is far superior to anything previously available about crime known to law enforcement. The data can be used to examine not only the attributes of incidents but also patterns of victimization across multiple offense types. For instance, BJS has done analysis of sexual assault data to examine what time of day those incidents are most likely to occur finding that the occurrence varies greatly based on the victim's age. Without NIBRS we could not have uncovered a pattern like that. 

Thanks for sharing that with us. Given the benefits of the system you just discussed, why didn't more states and law enforcement agencies transition to NIBRS on their own?

There were a large number of contributors that did successfully make the transition to NIBRS, but there were many others that faced challenges and were unable to modify their system to begin submitting that NIBRS data in time to meet the required cutoff date. These are agencies that would normally have been included in the national view, but will now not be represented. 

The challenges of transitioning to NIBRS varies across all these agencies and states, but some of the more common challenges are funding and technology issues. The transition requires technology changes, and departments have reported personnel issues in building the system and training delays regarding software use. For larger agencies, there have even been delays with a procurement process, whether that be approval for the transition from their city council or even their police agency policies. 

Crime perception has also been a concern, however, it’s been determined that this is a misconception. Agencies believe the more granular data that NIBRS provides may make it appear as if crime rates have risen. However, additional NIBRS data does not inherently mean that crime was on the rise. NIBRS is presenting a more complete picture of crime in any individual city or state by eliminating the hierarchy rule. 

To increase participation, the UCR program partnered with the Bureau of Justice Statistics on the National Crime Statistics Exchange, working with advocacy groups to emphasize the importance of NIBRS data and produce statistically valid estimates of crime across the nation. 

One of the benefits of NIBRS is the strength in numbers, which, with continued support from the UCR program as well as more agencies continue to transition to NIBRS, calendar year 2022 and subsequent years hope to provide a much broader and in-depth national view of crime based upon statistics. This will allow for comprehensive annual data and trend releases.

I would add to what Ed said as well that there are a number of agencies that made concerted efforts to transition but didn't quite meet the deadline for lots of reasons that were outside of their control. 

As Ed had mentioned, there were issues related to approvals at the city or county level, as well as issues related to the procurement of hardware, software, and the ability to use federal grant funds. But one of the things that you will see in 2022 is that a number of those agencies that had begun the process and didn't quite get there by the deadline will be on board during calendar year 2022, so we should see some really great improvements to the data as Ed had mentioned as well. 

Okay. What spurred the FBI to push forward with a full transition to NIBRS and to retire the old crime reporting system? 

A recommendation was made by professional law enforcement agencies and organizations to retire the summary reporting system and transition to NIBRS-based reporting. 

As most of the law enforcement community knows, in December of 2015, the CJIS Advisory Policy Board endorsed the transition to NIBRS with a deadline of January 1st 2021. 

The FBI message to law enforcement agencies that it would transition to the more comprehensive NIBRS only collection.

We've made nationwide implementation of NIBRS a top priority because NIBRS can provide more useful statistics to promote constructive discussion, measured planning, and informed policing. 

In addition to the recommendation from a number of the large law enforcement organizations in the country, the FBI and BJS worked pretty diligently together on the National Crime Statistics Exchange, or NCS-X as we call it, that Ed mentioned a little bit earlier. 

A lot of the preliminary NCS-X work was about the feasibility of expanding incident-based reporting across law enforcement agencies, and we did receive a large amount of positive reception among the agencies that we met with in the 2013 and 2014 time frames. 

Such positive reception that BJS actually began providing out federal grant funding to state agencies to help support their NIBRS transitions back beginning in 2015. 

We also identified from a different perspective the need for this more detailed crime data because of the kinds of requests that we were getting and we were having to reach out to our law enforcement partners to try to understand more about the kinds of data they collected.  

So one of the selling points here is that with all the data that we're able to capture through NIBRS, a lot of the burden of responding to these requests for information we can take off of the backs of law enforcement, which I think will be a real positive as this effort continues to move forward, and as more agencies transition to reporting to the system.

Now let's talk about the status of NIBRS when the transition was announced and what coverage looks like following the transition deadline. Have you seen any improvements in agency participation?  

Yeah, as mentioned earlier the numbers transition occurred in January of 2021. When the FBI began its transition to NIBRS-only reporting in 2016, there were approximately 6,600 agencies reporting NIBRS data from 33 state UCR programs. But on January 1st of 2021, there were over 9,400 agencies from 43 certified states reporting NIBRS data, and as of September 9, 2022, there are 12,374 federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies all reporting NIBRS data which represents 64.4 percent of total agencies reporting and that covers 69.5 percent of the nation's population.

As of now, all 50 states and the territory of Guam are all NIBRS certified. As more agencies continue to transition to NIBRS, calendar year 2022 and subsequent years will provide a much broader and a much more in-depth national view of crime based on statistics. 

This is going to allow for a comprehensive annual data and trend release. The FBI continues to work with these state and local programs, and these law enforcement partners to encourage participation in the UCR program and help these agencies as they transition to submitting crime data via NIBRS. 

Thanks. The FBI, BJS, and others have noted that some of the largest law enforcement agencies have not yet transitioned. Why not keep the old system in place as agencies move to NIBRS?  Without NYPD, Los Angeles, and other large city agencies, how can crime in the U.S be estimated? 

In April 2020, the UCR program requested updates from state UCR programs on the status of the non-train transitioned agencies and the updates revealed that about 75 percent of the nation's law enforcement agencies were committed to transitioning to NIBRS by January 1st 2021.

Based on this information the FBI stood firmly behind that deadline. The benefits of this transition will become increasingly clear though as more law enforcement partners provide their crime data to NIBRS.

With over 12,300 federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies all reporting NIBRS data, NIBRS participation is showing a steady growth compared to 2021 levels.

The upcoming crime in the United States 2021 release, it's going to look different from previous data releases as several agencies with large populations are among those not represented. It will not include violent crime or property crime trends, but to provide a confident comparison of crime trends across the nation the FBI's UCR program is partnered with BJS to conduct and release a NIBRS estimation crime trend analysis, and this analysis is going to it's going to use NIBRS estimation data of violent and property crimes from 2020 and 2021 by using a new robust estimation method and tool that was helped developed by RTI International in collaboration with BJS and the FBI.

I would also add that what we are seeing in terms of the NIBRS transition is quite positive. So when we're talking about large agencies that have transitioned, the story is actually really one of great success for agencies making the move as well as support for the national transition overall.

For instance, we've got two-thirds of the largest cities in the United States. Those cities that have 250,000 a persons or more in the population, two-thirds of those largest agencies are covered by NIBRS reporting agencies.

We've also seen a huge increase in tribal agency participation moving up from a very low percentage up to something in the 85 percent range right now in terms of tribal agency participation, and then CJIS has been very successful in getting quite a large number of federal law enforcement agencies on board as well.

Again we have to consider here that there are still agencies that are impacted by things that were outside of their own control when it comes to making the transition.

A number of them encountered problems with their service providers who helped support their records management systems, the data systems that actually house all of the data that supply information generally to the NIBRS collection, as well as some of those approval processes that we mentioned a little bit earlier and BJS and the FBI work directly with nearly every large agency to help them manage the transition even with those agencies that we knew were not going to be able to make the January 1st 2021 deadline and we still maintain contact with the vast majority of those agencies as well to keep apprised of where they are in their efforts.

Also we can say definitively that the number of agencies, especially the larger agencies that have transitioned, are greatly supporting the estimation work that BJS and the FBI have done together and provided us the ability to establish statistical methods that account for those missing or partial reporting agencies and the ability, as Ed had mentioned, to generate estimated violent crime and property crime counts and rates for the majority of states.

So what will the estimation work ultimately tell us about crime?

As part of the estimation work, we worked very closely, BJS and the FBI, to identify some of those really critical indicators of crime that we knew we could generate based on the NIBRS data.

We took a look across the entire data collection and we worked with a lot of outside expert organizations, law enforcement professionals, key executives who work in the law enforcement and practitioner community, as well as consulting with other organizations that are impacted by crime generally to talk about or to learn more about, I should say, what those key indicators of crime should be and how they're measured in NIBRS.

So we were able to come up with a very robust set of measures that looks across the totality of all those different and varied offense types that are captured within the NIBRS data collection, as well as capitalizing on a lot of the critical measures at the victimization level, and at the incident level that are captured.

Things like the relationships between victims and offenders, information about arrestees, if an arrest was made, if the case was cleared, the location at which an incident occurred, if the victim was injured, a whole myriad of different indicator types that we were able to establish for this effort.

So the estimation work is going to provide a national view across the vast majority of those key indicators, and the great thing about the way the NIBRS data collection is structured and the way that we have developed collectively this set of statistical procedures that guide the estimation is that it is scalable and extensible so we are able to build it out based on the types of information that are available, the quality of the information, and the completeness of the data coming into the system, and we're also able to make modifications based on new and emerging issues that present themselves sort of generally at the national or state level.

NIBRS has that kind of flexibility so we're able to not only generate estimates now using the NIBRS data for 2021 at the national level, but we also can generate estimates at the state level for the vast majority of states. Upwards of about 80 percent of the 50 U.S states were able to generate state level estimates of violent crime for, and that we're still going to be able to make all of the reported crime available as well.

So in addition to the estimations that will be generated using this new methodology, there will also be the NIBRS data files at the local reporting agency level that folks will still be able to access through both the FBI's crime data explorer website as well as resources that BJS will be making available after the release of these estimates so that no one feels like they don't have access to the raw information as they always have since you know for a very long time I'm not sure since NIBRS began, but for quite a number of years.

Our goal is then as coverage increases and more agencies come on board, we'll be able to put out an increased number of estimates, but that that will also increase the precision of those estimates so that the public can get an even more varied view of crime, and understand a little bit more what's going on at the local community level as part of the estimation procedures that are built and not just at the reported crime level.

One criticism of this transition is that it is a big effort for law enforcement, and they don't get much back in return. How would you guys respond to that?

Look law enforcement does get a lot back in return. With NIBRS offering more detail and context around crime, NIBRS provides two important elements for law enforcement agencies accountability and transparency. This more thorough data will help law enforcement target their resources and fight crime more effectively.

Using NIBRS data agencies can find similarities in crime fighting problems across neighboring jurisdictions which allows them to work together and develop solutions or strategize for addressing these issues.

In addition, the data allows tracking of offense trends, which managers can use more effectively when they try to define crime prevention and response strategies.

NIBRS participation provides statistics that a law enforcement agency can present to their Police Commissioner, police chief, sheriff, or even their director about the status of Public Safety within their jurisdiction and likewise legislators, municipal planners, academia, sociologists, advocacy groups, all these, and the public are provided with access to more extensive crime information than what SRS can offer.

The data allows for better opportunity of studying crime and criminal behavior, and in summary NIBRS data offers a statistical data set which provides an analysis of the attributes of crime, the correlation of crimes, and the source of the information on a variety of factors affecting crime rates. The NIBRS enriches the quality, quantity, and the timeliness of crime data collected by law enforcement who can use the data to inform, educate, and strengthen their nation's communities.

I would also add that the transition offers law enforcement executives the chance to engage with their constituents about the kinds of crime that are taking place in their communities. How much of that is stranger violence versus domestic violence. How much vandalism and other quality of life offenses are occurring.

That level of detail is something that was not available previously, and I also believe that these data will allow us to put a lot of other crimes or other phenomenon into context.

For instance, the FBI is currently starting a data collection on law enforcement suicides and I think that information about the kinds of incidents that agencies examine are impacted by on a on a daily basis can actually provide some context for the suicide data as well as the use of force data that the FBI are collecting currently.

In addition to that, BJS is undertaking some analytic work that should provide out at least some form of support to law enforcement. Things like online reports and the ability for law enforcement to come into a particular portal and use that portal to analyze their own local crime data with things like analytics on demand and downloadable data extracts for them to actually be able to use and capitalize on.

In addition to all that, we have a number of different resources developed jointly between BJS and the FBI that are currently available online through both the agencies, the federal agencies websites, as well as the site of the International Association of Chiefs of Police regarding things like how to talk about NIBRS data, how to plan for a successful transition, and other community engagement resources.

What is next for the FBI and BJs with NIBRS?

Together we're going to continue doing what works and where we see value. The FBI will continue to share the importance and the benefits of transitioning to NIBRS, and we're going to continue to provide data integration support training and technical assistance to all of our federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement agencies.

And BJS will turn its focus back to using the NIBRS data for statistical analysis purposes, looking specifically at sharing out data tools to support users who are interested in really examining the data themselves and trying to understand patterns and trends at across places and at specific agency levels.

We also have a number of analytic reports that we plan to make available over the next several years really trying to capitalize on the rich detailed data that are available within NIBRS and the ability to really contextualize that information at the local level.

We also are looking forward to putting out jointly, FBI and the and BJS, information about the statistical methodology that we're using for the estimation processes. A number of those publications have been released as of the middle of September of this year, but you can look forward to seeing more of that documentation when the estimates are released later this fall.

Well that pretty much wraps it up for today's podcast. I want to thank Edward Abraham again with the FBI and Erica Smith with BJS for taking the time to speak with us today.

Thanks so much. For anyone who wants to know a little bit more about what BJS is doing relative to the National Incident Based Reporting System, estimation work, or our work with the data in general, I invite you all to join us at the BJS website.

It's bjs.ojp.gov. there's a link to information about our work with the NIBRS system as well as background on the national crime statistics exchange as well for folks who want to know a little bit of the history of the work that BJS and the FBI have been doing together since 2013.

Thank you very much.