The Future of Crime Data

• Date: 01 November 2017
• Author: Kevin J. Strom,Erica L. Smith
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12336

RESEARCH ARTICLE

THE FUTURE OF CRIME DATA

The Future of Crime Data

The Case for the National Incident-Based Reporting System

(NIBRS) as a Primary Data Source for Policy Evaluation

and Crime Analysis

Kevin J. Strom

RTI International

Erica L. Smith

U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics

Research Summary

In this article, we describe the nation’s move to a crime-reporting system that is

exclusively incident based. Such a change presents challenges for the “crime-reporting

pipeline” and for researchers in managing and analyzing these more intricate data.

We highlight the shortcomings of the dominant system, the Uniform Crime Reporting

Program’s Summary Reporting System (SRS), and argue that the advantages of the

National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) qualify it to replace the SRS as

one of the nation’s primary sources for tracking and measuring crime. NIBRS is also

discussed in light of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), a source that

complements a system that relies on law-enforcement–generated crime data.

Policy Implications

The timing is right for a nationwide move toward NIBRS. The shift from aggregate

crime counts to details on each crime incident has broad implications for justice policy.

Use of a national incident-based collection of crimes known to the police provides (a)

a set of descriptive indicators of crime in the United States that are currently lacking,

Direct correspondence to Kevin J. Strom, Policing, Security, and Investigative Science Program, RTI

International, 3040 East Cornwallis Rd., P.O. Box 12194, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2194 (e-mail:

kstrom@rti.org).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12336 C2017 American Society of Criminology 1027

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 16 rIssue 4

Research Article The Future of Crime Data

(b) benchmarking for progress and change, and (c) more purposeful comparisons across

place and time. The shift also serves to professionalize the policing industry further and

provides transparencyon crime and how police respond to it. The greater understanding

of the crime problem will allow our programs, policies, and resource allocations to be

more deliberate and responsive.

Amovement is under way in the United States to reform what we know about

crime from the perspective of law enforcement agencies. Outside the world of

criminal justice practitioners and researchers, a common perception is that a rich

set of crime data is at the fingertips of analysts and policy makers. This perception may

be accurate for some law enforcement agencies—those that have both the most capable

records management systems (RMS) and the staff to analyze the more detailed inci-

dent data in them. Nevertheless, the stark reality is that at a national level, and within

many states, those detailed data do not exist; our national system is reliant on aggregated

summary statistics that provide little more than high-level counts of traditional offense

categories.

The Summary Reporting System (SRS) of the FBI’sUniform Crime Reporting (UCR)

Program has been entrenched as the primary indicator of the prevalence and nature of

crime since the 1930s when it was first initiated by the International Association of Chiefs

of Police (IACP). The IACP’s goal at the inception of the data collection was to establish a

national system for collecting information on crime in a uniform, standardized way across

numerous law enforcement agencies; during that first year, aggregate counts of crime were

collected from approximately 400 law enforcement agencies across the country (Poggio,

Kennedy, Chaiken, and Carlson, 1985). Also during that first year, Congress enacted Title

28, Section 534, of the U.S. Code authorizing the Attorney General of the United States

to gather crime information [Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 2017]; the Attorney

General in turn tasked the FBI with serving as the collection agent for those data. The

FBI’s UCR Program has steadily increased participation of U.S. law enforcement agencies

since 1930 and more recently from an estimated 18,439 in 2015. In 2015, law enforcement

agencies reporting data to the UCR Program represented more than 314 million U.S.

residents, or approximately 99% of the total population (FBI, Criminal Justice Information

Services Division, 2016):

In January 1930, 400 cities representing 20 million inhabitants in 43 states

began participating in the UCR Program. Congress enacted Title 28, Section

534, of the United States Code authorizing the Attorney General to gather

crime information that same year. The Attorney General, in turn, designated

the FBI to serve as the national clearinghouse for the crime data collected.

(FBI, 2017: para. 3 of “Historical background of UCR”)

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