What’s the U.S. Crime Rate? FBI Missing Data from Florida, New York and More

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For more than 100 years, the FBI has collected crime data from local police departments across the country through the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which remains the gold standard for national crime statistics.

As of 2020, nearly all law enforcement agencies are included in the FBI’s database. Some agencies report major figures, such as the total number of murders or auto thefts, through a summary reporting system. Others reported detailed incident data through the newer National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which contains detailed information on each reported crime.

Then everything changed in 2021. In an effort to fully modernize the system, the FBI stopped taking data from the old summary system and only accepted data through the new system. Thousands of police agencies have been eliminated because they did not keep up with the changes.

The Marshall Project is using data obtained from the FBI to track police agency involvement. Here are four takeaways from our analysis.

Participation in the FBI database has improved slightly, now including about two-thirds of law enforcement agencies.

More than 6,000 law enforcement agencies, nearly one-third of the nation’s 18,000 police agencies, were missing from the FBI’s national crime data last year. That means a quarter of the U.S. population was not included in last year’s federal crime figures, according to a Marshall Plan analysis.

The old summary-level data reporting system, which was retired in 2021, was revived last year when the FBI announced it would again accept data through the system. It’s unclear how many police agencies have taken advantage of the opportunity, as participation data is not yet available. But many states, like illinoishas plans to phase out the old system.

The number of reports increased compared with 2021, the first year the FBI changed its collection system, with 2,000 police agencies submitting criminal records for 2022. But data gaps still pose major challenges for academics and policymakers to understand crime trends.

Many of the largest police departments, such as the NYPD and LAPD, remain missing.

Some large police departments, such as the Miami-Dade Police Department, will begin reporting data to the FBI again in 2022. But the New York Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department, two of the nation’s largest police agencies, remain missing from the federal data.

An LAPD spokesman said the department used an old data collection system to submit crime data to the California Department of Justice but was still working to comply with the FBI’s new recording standards. “Our intention is to implement it by January 1, 2024 as part of the rollout of the new (records management) system,” the spokesperson said.

An NYPD spokesperson said the department is currently collecting crime data under the new system. “We anticipate that the agency will achieve NIBRS accreditation in the near future,” the spokesman said, without providing a specific timeline.

Fewer than 10 percent of agencies in Florida and Pennsylvania provided national crime data, but many states had near-perfect submission rates.

Most police agencies do not submit data directly to the FBI. Instead, police agencies typically submit crime data to state law enforcement, which acts as a data clearinghouse. The state agency then submits all agency data to the FBI.

In 2021, California and Florida were the only two states not to be certified on time for the FBI’s new data collection system, meaning neither state would be able to submit any data by the FBI’s deadline. Beginning in 2022, both states are certified to submit crime data through the FBI’s new system.

Nearly 400 California police agencies, half of the state’s agencies, were included in the FBI’s crime data last year after the two states began submitting data. It’s a notable leap from 2021, when only a handful of agencies in California that submit records directly to the FBI exist in federal databases.

In Florida, however, only 49 of the state’s more than 500 agencies submitted data to the FBI last year, accounting for less than 8 percent of the state’s police departments. Some of the largest agencies, such as the Miami Police Department, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and the St. Petersburg Police Department, are missing from the national context.

While Florida agencies have the lowest participation rate in federal crime data, Pennsylvania is a close second, with more than 90 percent of the state’s police agencies missing.

It is followed by New York state, where three-quarters of its agencies are missing from the federal database. These include three police agencies in the state with jurisdiction over 1 million people: the NYPD, Suffolk County Police Department and Nassau County Police Department.

On the other hand, 17 states lead the way, with near-perfect participation in the FBI’s crime data.

Fragmented crime data has real consequences.

Incomplete national crime statistics led to confusion and uncertainty last year.

When the FBI released its 2021 national crime data last fall, it couldn’t determine whether crime rates were up, down or staying the same. The FBI concluded that all three scenarios were possible due to gaps in data collection.

Data issues have also affected hate crime statistics. When the FBI first released its hate crime numbers, it looked like those numbers had plummeted.But the report missed nearly 40 percent of hate crimes committed by the country’s law enforcement agencies, and the agency faced outcry from experts and policymakers who said the figures “Worse than meaningless.”

The FBI then contacted more than 7,000 police departments that do not provide hate crime data and asked them to submit data through an old data collection system that was supposed to be decommissioned. When the FBI released a new hate crime report with more data this spring, it showed that hate crimes increased by nearly 12 percent from 2020 to 2021.

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his presidential bid in June, he boasted that Florida’s crime rate would hit a 50-year low in 2021. But his claim relies on incomplete data — more than 40 percent of Florida’s population is missing. In 2021, many police departments are transitioning their records management systems to the new FBI standard to capture 2021 crime data.

In Wichita, incumbent Mayor Brandon Whipple used faulty crime statistics in his re-election campaign earlier this summer.Use data from FBI Crime Data BrowserWhipple claims violent crime fell in half during his administration. But the reality is that the FBI data misses half of the violent crimes recorded by the Wichita Police Department, a mess created by the department’s attempts to transform its crime data reporting system, First reported by the Wichita Eagle.

With many police departments still in the process of complying with the FBI’s new reporting requirements, experts predict that national crime data may be incomplete in the coming years and will politicize crime statistics without concrete evidence. More space. These questions may become even more urgent as the country approaches another election cycle in which crime is certainly a potential problem: In 2024, the FBI may release its national crime data ahead of the election.

“People will use crime data to make any point they want,” says Jeff Asher, a criminologist and co-founder of AH Datalytics. “When you’re not sure that almost every agency is reporting data, That means you need a lot of knowledge to fight malicious representations.”