Who Reported NIBRS Data in 2022?
The Marshall Project got data from the FBI showing who reported and who didn't last year
The Marshall Project has done it again, getting NIBRS participation data from the FBI well before it is published for the second straight year. This is a critically important source for easily understanding participation trends, I’m a huge fan.
For those that don’t know, NIBRS stands for the National Incident-Based Reporting System and is the bread and butter system for agencies reporting crime data to the FBI. If you want more background you can check out previous things I’ve written on the subject here, here, and here.
As The Marshall Project summarizes reporting for 2022:
In 2022, 31% of the 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. failed to report crime data to the FBI's national database after transitioning to a new data collection system, according to the latest statistics from the FBI. Participation has improved since 2021 when almost 40% of the agencies were missing.
A few things jump out when looking at the data provided by The Marshall Project.
First, the progress is not enormous but there is definite progress from last year. Nearly half of all agencies in California reported data in 2022, up from under 2 percent in 2021. New Mexico, Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Iowa, and Alaska all increased the share of agencies reporting data by 15 percent or more. Struggling states such as Pennsylvania and Florida are still struggling, but Pennsylvania increased NIBRS reporting from 2 percent to 9 percent reporting and Florida increased from 0.3 percent to almost 8 percent.
Second, there’s still lots of work to do. As I’ve written before, roughly 95 to 97 percent of agencies regularly reported data each year under the old Summary Reporting System. NIBRS participation is increasing but it is still substantially below SRS participation and probably won’t see those levels anytime soon.
This is less of an issue for national crime estimates thanks to changes being implemented by the FBI to take in more data (as I previously wrote), but it still represents a hole in our nation’s crime data. NYPD and LAPD did not report data for 2022 though my understanding is both agencies are getting closer and should be compliant in either 2023 or 2024. The below graph clearly shows both the progress so far and the remaining challenge.
Third, non-compliance with NIBRS is becoming a smaller agency problem. Take a closer look at the above graph and you’ll see the blue line — percent of the US population covered by a NIBRS-reporting agency — has crossed with the red line — percent of agencies reporting. This gap will grow even further when NYPD and LAPD — two agencies representing 11 million people — start reporting via NIBRS.
The implication is that more bigger agencies representing a larger share of the US population are reporting to NIBRS each year. Only half of the 12 cities with 1 million or more people reported 12 months of NIBRS data in 2021 compared to 9 of 12 cities in 2022. This matters for the path forward as the effort needed to enlist smaller agencies to NIBRS will yield smaller growth in the share of the US population covered.
Crime data tends to be a black hole of information, almost always needlessly so. NIBRS will likely be formally released in October, but knowing who submitted data prior to that data release is a great step towards contextualizing whatever is released in a few months.