Did you read the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Division Uniform Crime Reporting Program 2025.0 National Incident-Based Reporting System User Manual redline report from June 2025? I bet you did, but on the off chance that you didn’t I’m going to highlight the big news.
This document outlines the changes that are coming to the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The brilliant Jacob Kaplan pointed out that the new manual was released and that it contains an enormous change: the FBI is going to start accepting data on non-fatal shootings.
The text in the manual is mundane to the point of comedy, buried between a bunch of relatively basic changes. There’s adding cohabitant as a victim/offender relationship element, deadly/dangerous/communicable disease as a weapon/force element, and changing “fondling” to “criminal sexual contact.”
But the major change reads: “Updated Data element 33 to add G = Gunshot Wound to Injury Type.”
The advantage of NIBRS is that it collects a TON of information on each incident, far beyond what is collected under the old Summary Reporting System. In this case, data element 33 says that if the victim is an individual (as opposed to, say, a business) and the offense is one of 14 types — including murder, aggravated assault, and robbery — then agencies should report whether the victim was injured and how (broken bones, laceration, etc). For the first time, the FBI is telling agencies to note whether a crime victim received a gunshot wound during the crime.
How it works is that if somebody is the victim of a non-fatal shooting then there will be an aggravated assault with a victim with a gunshot wound.
Some agencies track shooting victims, but there is no standardized way of doing so. Places like Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New York City all publish victim-level open data which many other places publish aggregated counts on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis.
The NIBRS collection will make it possible for every agency to report victim-level shooting data. Combining the shooting data with the FBI’s new monthly reporting means a potential quantum leap in our understanding of gun violence in the United States.
One challenge with NIBRS is that individual officers are tasked with collecting an enormous amount of information on each incident, so it will take a while for agencies to get acclimated to the change and for enough data to be collected to establish trends.
It’ll also be important to compare NIBRS counts of non-fatal shootings to the few dozen agencies that publish shooting counts as well as the Gun Violence Archive’s collection.
When done right, collecting formal data on non-fatal shootings will close an enormous data collection gap in the United States. And we are one step closer to that important milestone thanks to this NIBRS change.
This is great news. It is critical for the truth about ALL gun related incidents to be reported. We, the Ametican public, deservevto know!
Thank you for sharing this important information!