Blogpost by Paul Wormelli: “…Our national system of describing the extent of crime in the U.S. is broken beyond repair and deserves to be replaced by a totally new paradigm (system).
Since 1930, we have relied on the metrics generated by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program to describe crime in the U.S., but it simply does not do so, even with its evolution into the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Criminologists have long recognized the limited scope of the UCR summary crime data, leading to the creation of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and other supplementary crime data measurement vehicles. However, despite these measures, the United States still has no comprehensive national data on the amount of crime that has occurred. Even after decades of collecting data, the 1968 Presidential Crime Commission report on the Challenge of Crime in a Free Society lamented the absence of sound and complete data on crime in the U.S., and called for the creation of a National Crime Survey (NCS) that eventually led to the creation of the NCVS. Since then, we have slowly attempted to make improvements that will lead to more robust data. Only in 2021 did the FBI end UCR summary-based crime data collection and move to NIBRS crime data collection on a national scale.
Admittedly, the shift to NIBRS will unleash a sea change in how we analyze crime data and use it for decision making. However, it still lacks the completeness of national crime reporting. In the landmark study of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Statistics (funded by the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics to make recommendations on modernizing crime statistics), the panel members grappled with this reality and called out the absence of national statistics on crime that would fully inform policymaking on this critical subject….(More)”