States Lack Support for NIBRS

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On the Quality of NIBRS Data

June 10, 2018

Keith Greiner

This essay is about how some states are failing their obligation to the U. S. by failing to report their crime statistics.

Effective and efficient decision-making depends on high quality data. That’s why there is a renewed emphasis on data “analytics”. Businesses need to know details of customer demographics, and purchases. In government, effective decision-making requires data that tells describes who needs services, who is, (or is not) receiving services, how those services can best be provided, and whether the services are successful. An important task of the Federal government is to collect, and publish, appropriate data from individuals, communities and states. Examples include the Census, employment data, health surveillance data, and the higher education data collected and published by the National Center for Education Statistics. In each case it is also important for states to support the collection of data and in many cases, to facilitate the collection of data.

Higher education data collection is an example. For higher education, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) often has a 100.0% response rate. Every state has an IPEDS coordinator who works with higher education institutions and the U. S. Department of Education to ensure that response. Analysts at the Institutional, State, and Federal levels find the IPEDS data to be valuable for the analysis of higher education data and the development of high quality higher education decision-making.

Such is not the case for the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The NIBRS is designed to collect and report crime data, based on input from 22,784 sources in every state. The NIBRS is planned to be the primary data collection and reporting system in 2021. The sources include community police departments, county sheriff offices, higher education institutions, and states. As of the 2016 data, only 70.9% of the possible reporting agencies actually reported any data in 2016. Only 27.7% reported data for all 12 months of 2016. The list of states includes non-states like the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam for a total of 55 states and state-like entities. Sixteen of those entities (29.1%) reported no data whatsoever in 2016. The non-reporting entities were….

Another 10 states had fewer than 10% of their agencies reporting 12 months of data for 2016.

When the level of participation is mapped and color-coded, with green as the highest response rate and red as the lowest and no-response rates, the map looks like the following.

Looking at a close-up of the 48 contiguous states, we have the following:

The red is unmistakable. It signifies a state that is doing little or nothing to contribute to the quality of national and state policy-making on crime issues.

The states marked in red need to be encouraged to start participating in the NIBRS – for the benefit of all of us.

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