The FBI's National Crime Estimates for 2022 Should Be Much Better

One tweak should mean improved national crime data reporting.

National crime estimates for 2021 were a mess, but estimates for 2022 (and hopefully beyond) should be much better. To understand why we need to go back nearly a century to the dawn of national crime data collection and reporting.

Since 1930, agencies have submitted data to the FBI covering 7 major categories of violent and property crime – arson was added in 1979 – under a system called the Summary Reporting System (SRS). This system was good at capturing overarching crime figures but was somewhat lacking in depth. In the late 1980s a new system was developed called the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) which brings a greater level of depth to crime data and modifies what data is reported to allow for more accurate crime counts nationwide.

NIBRS has clear advantages over SRS.

NIBRS allows agencies to report a multitude of data points on dozens of crimes which will enable policymakers, researchers, and citizens to better understand what is happening in communities. NIBRS also does away with the hierarchy rule, an archaic rule under SRS that allowed for only the most serious offense in an incident to be reported. So, a robbery that turned into a murder would only be reported as a murder in the old system, but both offenses would be reported under NIBRS.

There are also plans for NIBRS to accept information on non-fatal shootings. There is no national data collection system on shooting victims who survive which greatly impedes our ability to analyze and understand local and national gun violence trends. It is not yet clear how soon this change will be implemented – it was supposed to be ready for 2023 but that does not appear to have happened – but systemic data collection on non-fatal shootings will be a boon for gun violence research and violence reduction programs.

NIBRS would be a far superior crime data reporting system if one was designing a system from scratch, but a large portion of the country does not use NIBRS to report data even decades after the system was introduced. Only about 1/3 of agencies nationwide were reporting data via NIBRS when the FBI announced in 2015 that it would not allow agencies to submit data via SRS, only NIBRS starting in 2021.

Many agencies did make the transition to NIBRS in the ensuing 6 years, but by 2021 only around 2/3 of agencies were NIBRS-compliant. Just over half of the US population was covered by an agency that submitted a full year of data for 2021.

SRS is by no means a perfect system, but it has the advantage of near completeness. National crime estimates under SRS were able to draw on reporting from 95 to 97 percent of agencies nationwide meaning that the amount of estimating that had to be made was pretty small each year. When the FBI said there were X number of murders in a year then you knew with confidence that it was right around that figure.

The FBI and BJS relied on a much smaller pool of agencies to estimate national trends in 2021. As a result, there were some enormous error bars attached to national and state estimates.

The FBI estimated that there were 22,900 murders nationally in 2021 with a margin of error between 21,300 and 24,600 murders. Violent crime was estimated to have fallen 1 percent from 2020 to 2021 with a margin of error between a 12 percent decline and a 12 percent increase. Property crime was estimated to have fallen 4 percent from 2020 to 2021 with a margin of error between a 38 percent decrease and a 50 percent increase.

There is good news on the horizon though as the major headache of 2021’s estimates appear to be mostly solved. The national crime estimates for 2021 will likely always require an asterisk, but one skewed year of crime statistics is much easier to accept than three or four skewed years.

The solution lies in a tweak in what data the FBI will accept from agencies in 2022. Only allowing NIBRS-compliant agencies to submit data in 2021 may have been the kick in the pants that many agencies needed to hurry up the transition to NIBRS, but it also meant big problems when it was time to create estimates of how many murders, robberies, and auto thefts there were that year.

Before 2021, data was submitted to the FBI via both NIBRS and SRS to generate national crime estimates. When the FBI estimated that there were 16,425 murders in 2019, for example, it did so with a nearly equal split of data from NIBRS and SRS agencies as shown in the below breakdown of participation.

Crime data reporting to the FBI in 2019 by reporting system (Source: FBI)

SRS was lopped off as a reporting option for 2021 but it is returning as a possibility for 2022 for agencies that have not yet made the transition to NIBRS. An agency that is not NIBRS-compliant can still tell the FBI how many major crimes they had in 2022 and that agency’s data can inform the national estimate of how many crimes occurred in 2022.

It’s not quite clear how many agencies that aren’t NIBRS-compliant will still submit 2022 data to the FBI. According to The Marshall Project, 68 percent of US agencies reported data via NIBRS in 2022 though it remains to be seen what share of the population was covered by a NIBRS-compliant agency.

Regardless, allowing agencies to submit data via SRS again should mean the national estimates can rely on many more agencies than the 65 percent that drove 2021’s estimates. In the meantime, some of the nation’s largest police departments such as NYPD and LAPD should be NIBRS-compliant to start 2024.

Understanding our national crime trend begins with having reliable and accessible data. The NIBRS transition is still ongoing, but allowing non-NIBRS agencies to submit is a great way to ensure stronger estimates can be made in the interim.