Was Crime Up or Down in 2021? Why the FBI Can’t Tell Us

The FBI’s annual report on crime in the United States, released Oct. 5., was the first one produced under a new and far more detailed data format—the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).

NIBRS replaces the “summary system” the FBI has used since the 1930s, which included major felony offenses and arrests recorded by local law enforcement agencies. NIBRS counts many more offenses and provides much greater detail about them, such as the age, sex, and race of victims and the circumstances of the crimes.

NIBRS has been in the works since the 1980s and so it’s about time a full conversion was made. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the conversion to NIBRS is far from complete.

Only 62 percent of law enforcement agencies, covering about 65 percent of the U.S. population, had made the switch to NIBRS by the FBI’s deadline of Jan. 1, 2022. And many other agencies submitted NIBRS data that covered only part of the year.

Just 52 percent submitted data for all 12 months of 2021.

Were that not bad enough, the police departments of some of the nation’s largest cities submitted no data at all. That included departments in New York, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco.

And some states are barely covered by the NIBRS data. Only 15 of California’s 740 law enforcement agencies, 40 of Pennsylvania’s 1,504 agencies, and two of Florida’s 757 law enforcement agencies sent in data. The crime data for non-participating agencies have to be estimated based on data for prior years and comparisons with agencies of similar population size and composition.

With participation rates this low and uneven, and the need to estimate such a large number of unknowns, the FBI itself cautions against comparing the 2021 data with data from previous years.

That means our official crime statistics cannot answer the most basic question about crime: whether it’s going up or down.

That would be a problem in any year. It’s an especially serious problem right now, when crime has again moved to the forefront of public concerns and looms as a leading issue in the upcoming midterm elections.

The uncertainties surrounding the crime data are grist for the political mill. If your position is that crime increases are exaggerated, just cite the FBI’s estimate that robbery went down by 9 percent.

If you want voters to believe crime is out of control, cite the estimate that murder went up over 4 percent. Either way, who’s to say you’re right or wrong?

It did not have to be this way.

The FBI should not be faulted for pushing hard on NIBRS. It’s a much better statistical system and should have been fully implemented long before now. Moreover, law enforcement agencies were not caught unawares that NIBRS was coming.

The Department of Justice announced the conversion to NIBRS in 2015 and distributed over $120 million to prepare for the transition.

But the FBI knew well ahead of the January 2022 deadline that NIBRS participation would be much lower than the 85 percent-95 percent participation rate in the former summary system and would therefore require far more estimation than needed in the past.

At that point, in the fall of 2021, the FBI could have decided to allow agencies that would not be able to meet the upcoming deadline to submit summary data in lieu of NIBRS. Instead, the agency chose to require full compliance with NIBRS by the deadline with no exceptions.

It is not simply with the benefit of hindsight that we know that was a mistake.

The FBI knew that the NIBRS conversion would be a technical challenge for many agencies. That is why they were given fair warning years ago and funds to support the transition. But technical issues are not the primary stumbling block that has slowed the transition.

The major obstacle is that law enforcement agencies are not required to submit crime data to the FBI.

Voluntary participation in the nation’s crime reporting system might have made sense in 1930 when the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program was established.

Many law enforcement agencies, with venerable traditions of independence and local control, would have resisted a mandate to send sensitive information to Washington that would be made public and could be used to criticize their performance.

But the days when crime data were treated as the personal property of the local sheriff or police chief are long gone. If the FBI cannot or will not require local law enforcement to submit their crime data, Congress can, and should.

Richard Rosenfeld

Meanwhile, we are left with the hope that 2021 will be a one-off anomaly in the nation’s 90 year-old crime data infrastructure.

A serious glitch to be sure, and one that could have been avoided, but a teachable moment that offers important lessons for how to operate a bona fide federal statistical system.

The first lesson is this: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Richard Rosenfeld, Ph.D., is Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. His research focuses on crime trends and crime control policy. Dr. Rosenfeld is a Fellow and former President of the American Society of Criminology.