Did 6,000 Agencies Fail To Report Crime Data in 2022?

Digging into which agencies did and did not report UCR data in 2022.

There has been a fair amount of weird hubbub around agencies not reporting data to the FBI as an explanation for why reported crime is falling nationally. The theory makes sense, if agencies don’t report data then the FBI won’t count them and then crime will inherently fall. That’s not how it works, but the theory makes sense.

Much of the confusion seems to stem from a July 2023 article from the Marshall Project which (correctly at the time) noted that 6,000 or so agencies hadn't submitted data to the FBI’s NIBRS collection for 2022 as of February 2023. What the Marshall Project didn’t know at the time of publication (because it hadn’t been publicized) was that the FBI was going to allow non-NIBRS agencies to submit data for 2022. So while not submitting data via NIBRS meant an agency did not participate in 2021, it didn’t inherently mean an agency didn’t participate in 2022.

It’s easy and intuitive to figure out the total number of agencies that reported in 2022. All you have to do is go to the CDE’s downloads section, scroll to the NIBRS section, select Participation and 2022 in the drop down menus, download the participation file for 2022, and open the Number of Law Enforcement Agencies and Population Covered Enrolled, Participation Status, and Method of Data Submission by Population Group, 2022 spreadsheet.

Like I said, easy.

If you do all that you get a spreadsheet that looks like this showing nearly 2,500 non-NIBRS agencies (like NYPD and LAPD) nonetheless reporting crime data.

There were 18,884 agencies representing 333 million people active in the UCR program in 2022. Of that total, over 15,700 agencies representing around 311 million people reported data in some manner that year (~94 percent population coverage).

They also have a breakdown of NIBRS-only agencies that reported data and non-NIBRS agencies that submitted data via the older Summary Reporting System (SRS). The first sign that far fewer than 6,000 agencies failed to report in 2022 is that 18,884 minus 15,724 is not 6,000.

It’s also easy to breakdown which agencies reported in a given year to better understand who didn't report and see whether the assertion that major cities like New York and Los Angeles aren't included in the FBI's annual data.

Participation data is available from the Crime Data Explorer’s main page all the way back to 1960 if you scroll down below the map and select the “Agency Participation Data” link. You’ll download a large file that will have every agency’s participation status back to 1960 (along with numerous other details about that agency). To figure out if an agency reported filter out agencies classified as from US Possessions (Guam, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and American Samoa), then select agencies where the Publishable column is Y.

That process gets you 18,884 agencies in 2022, easy again! Then sort by the Participation column and you now know which agencies reported in any given year and which didn’t. Note that agencies sometimes submit data covering a year after the year ends, so the participation figures for 2022 will undoubtedly improve when the 2023 data is finalized in October.

Only 1 of the 90 agencies representing 250,000 or more people failed to report data to the FBI in 2022 (Tucson, AZ) while 17 of the 329 cities over 100,000 failed to report. The vast majority of agencies that didn’t report in 2022 were small agencies representing populations between 0 and 10,000 — 2,667 of 3,158 (84%). The share of each group’s population that reported data in 2022 is below¹:

If you want to see if an agency reported data in 2022 I’ve made the below searchable table:

Smaller agencies are generally more likely to not report, but that doesn’t mean that a ton of rural crimes are being missed in national estimates. To begin with, when agencies don’t report then the FBI estimates their totals using historical reporting patterns. Smaller cities also make up just a tiny fraction of the overall crime in a given year even if they make up the bulk of the missing agencies. Finally, over three quarters of agencies representing under 10,000 people still reported data in 2022, so non-reporting agencies are still in the minority in smaller cities and counties.

Lastly, I wanted to see how 2022’s participation coverage compared historically. I did this a few weeks ago looking at just this century, but extending the exercise to the entire period of data back to 1960 shows that 2022’s non-reporting figure of 93.5 percent is slightly lower than recent norms but nearly exactly in line with the historic average (94 percent) — and 2022’s reporting coverage will increase when 2023’s figures come out.

So there you have it.

Crime was not down because globs of big cities didn’t report (unless you believe most crime happens in Tucson). The share of agencies not reporting data was a major problem in 2021 but that problem was largely solved by 2022 (which wasn’t evident until October 2023). Most agencies that didn’t report were smaller agencies which is a recurring problem (90 percent of agencies that didn’t report between 2010 and 2020 represented populations of 1 to 9,999 people).

Getting smaller agencies the support they need to report data more consistently is an important issue that I’ve written about before. The level of knowledge required to access participation data is a similar problem laid bare here. But hopefully this assessment makes clear that bigger cities failing to report data is certainly not the driver of recent reported crime trends.

1. Note that the number of agencies and total population covered by reported agencies in the raw data is off by 2 agencies and about 70,000 people from the share reported by the FBI in the participation table. I’m not entirely sure which agencies those are though. It’s a tiny difference and I’m not sure why it exists, but these things happen with crime data.