Reporting crimes to the federal database became voluntary under Biden. The major crime cities aren’t reporting all of their crimes. Of course the reported crime rates will fall if only the federal database is used.
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Nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country did not submit any data in 2021 to a newly revised FBI crime statistics collection program, leaving a massive gap in information sure to be exploited by politicians in midterm election campaigns already dominated by public fear over a rise in violent crime.
This article was published in partnership with Axios Local.The gap includes the nation’s two largest cities by population, New York City and Los Angeles, as well as most agencies in five of the six most populous states: California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Florida. (See if your local police reported.)Download the agency participation data used in this piece.
In 2021, the FBI retired its nearly century-old national crime data collection program, the Summary Reporting System used by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. The agency switched to a new system, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which gathers more specific information on each incident.
Even though the FBI announced the transition years ago and the federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help local police make the switch, about 7,000 of the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies did not successfully send crime data to the voluntary program last year.