Tagged: uniform crime report

Unpacking the truth: California’s reforms and crime data accuracy

by · Aug 15, 2024 5:18 pm

In recent years, the debate surrounding criminal justice reforms in California, has sparked significant discussion. A recent paper by the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice claims that reforms such as Proposition 47 have led to a substantial decrease in property crime rates, citing a 53% reduction since 1995 and a 13% decline in Part I property crimes from 2009 to 2023. While the paper shows real data on reported crime, their analysis is oversimplified and missing several important details, presenting potential flaws in their argument.

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Comparing nationwide violent crime estimates: Summary-based vs. incident-based reporting

by · Nov 22, 2022 10:53 am

The FBI released official 2021 crime statistics last month, but the data leaves major gaps in our understanding of national-level crime rates. Unfortunately, the numbers are incomplete this year because 36% of U.S. law enforcement agencies, some of them major cities, failed to submit their crime reports. This is largely because the FBI made major changes to the way that it collects crime data, making the submission process much more complicated. Rather than following the arduous process, many agencies simply declined to participate in last year’s data collection. In comparison, 2020 crime statistics included data from 85% of U.S. law enforcement agencies.

This post briefly reviews agency participation rates and discusses what that means for our current understanding of national-level crime. Then, using data from the years 2017-2020 (all of the years for which data from both systems are available),  I examine whether the two systems produce similar violent crime estimates. Continue reading . . .

Violent crime is a key issue for U.S. midterm election

by · Nov 7, 2022 11:47 am

Crime has become a big issue in the U.S. midterm elections. According to a recent Gallup poll, crime ranked as the second most important issue among voters, with 71% of registered voters saying it was either “extremely” or “very” important to their vote. This came second after the economy, which 85% of voters said would be extremely or very important to their vote. According to a different Gallup survey released a few weeks ago, more than half of Americans (56%) said there was more crime in their area compared to a year ago. According to Gallup, “That’s up a whopping 11 points from 2021 and 18 points from 2020, and is the highest mark ever measured.” This issue was a concern across party lines, with 73% of Republicans, 51% of Independents, and 42% of Democrats all agreeing that crime is getting worse (in 2020, these percentages were 38%, 38%, and 37%, respectively).

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2021 national crime rates are a mystery as FBI transitions to a new data system

by · Oct 21, 2022 7:29 am

Earlier this month, the FBI released the national-level crime statistics for 2021. According to that data, violent crime, particularly murder, remained a major issue in the United States. Crime remained relatively consistent from 2020 to 2021 with no statistically significant changes between years, though violent crime was still elevated compared to 2019 levels. From 2020 to 2021, national levels of violent crime decreased slightly (-1.0%), largely driven by decreases in robbery (-8.9%). Murders, however, increased (+4.3%). The data is available for download via the Crime Data Explorer, or it can be accessed using a new tool called the Law Enforcement Agency Reported Crime Analysis Tool (LEARCAT). But the data this year may be lower quality than years past, limiting our ability to draw inferences about national-level crime rates.

Policymakers and researchers rely on these data to understand state and national crime trends, but that may be more challenging this year. Unfortunately, the FBI’s plan to modernize its reporting of crime data has not gone according to plan, so it’s hard know how accurate these 2021 estimates are. The new system has advantages over the old system, but it is much more cumbersome and time-consuming to use, which has negatively impacted law enforcement agencies’ willingness to submit their data. And because of these low participation rates, there are huge gaps in nationwide crime statistics for 2021.

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FBI releases first quarter of crime data for 2022

by · Jun 9, 2022 2:20 pm

Earlier this week, the FBI released the first quarter of crime data for 2022. There has been no official government report published at this time, though I examined the data to get an idea of whether crime increased or decreased relative to the first quarter of 2021. Unfortunately, I was unable to compare the data to quarter one of 2019 and 2020 as those data are not currently available by quarter.

Rates for all types of crime remained relatively stable, though this may change as we head into the summer. Larceny offenses saw the largest increase, which was only a mere 0.08%, and overall property crime increased 0.05%. The largest decrease was for arson, which decreased by about 0.2%. Rates for murder decreased by .08% (see more details in the table below).

The nation’s two official crime measures: NCVS and UCR

by · Feb 17, 2022 3:28 pm

This week, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released official numbers on the nation’s two crime measures: the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The UCR measures crime that is reported to the police, and the NCVS data is based on individuals’ reporting of past victimizations. The main strength of the NCVS is that it can measure unreported crime, and together the two datasets can be helpful for determining reporting rates. The report released by BJS shows crime rates measured by the UCR and the NCVS for the years 2011 through 2020. When comparing the estimates, reporting rates tend to be higher for violent crimes than property crimes, with the exception of motor vehicle theft. 

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Homicides continued to rise during 2021

by · Jan 27, 2022 9:21 am

As many people have reported, there was a drastic increase in violent crime (particularly driven by homicide increases) from 2019 to 2020. Not surprisingly, people are interested to know whether this pattern continued into 2021, and if so, to what extent.

A recent report published by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) attempts to shed light on this by collating information on crimes occurring in 2021 from a subset of 27 United States cities. Trends for individual crime types presented in the report do coincide with other estimates in terms of the overall pattern witnessed in 2021. However, the sample size of 27 cities is very small, meaning that their estimates (especially for homicide) are smaller in magnitude and likely do not reflect the full extent of the problem.

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The future of crime data in policing

by · Jun 24, 2021 3:56 pm

January 1, 2021 marked the end of an era when the FBI officially retired the nearly 100-year old Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system in lieu of a more comprehensive option known as the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The UCR, otherwise referred to as “simple summary reporting” (SRS) was introduced in 1929, and essentially reported aggregated counts of crimes at monthly and yearly intervals for participating law enforcement agencies. NIBRS was introduced in 1982 in an attempt to modernize the UCR, emphasizing incident-level data collection rather than aggregate-level. The purpose of this was to provide more detail and context about each incident (e.g. details on victims or offenders of crime, characteristics of the incident) to improve crime data quality (and quantity). The comprehensive data collected via NIBRS would allow for more opportunities to analyze patterns of crime and apply it to the field. However, one downside of NIBRS is that data are more burdensome for law enforcement agencies to collect. Further, participation in both UCR and NIBRS is voluntary for law enforcement agencies, meaning that additional burden might affect participation rates. Not surprisingly, participation rates are typically higher for the UCR, making it the preferred official source for reported crime data up until very recently. Continue reading . . .