Studying the Crime Problem with NIBRS Data: Current Uses and Future Trends

Since 1930, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) through its national Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) has collected mainly aggregate counts of crime from state and local law enforcement agencies. This focus limits the official crime data available for analysis and policy making because, with the exception of homicides,1 characteristics of specific incidents are unknown. Information such as crime location, use of weapons, type of property stolen as well as victim and offender demographics provides a more complete picture of crime and crime patterns. Such details enable assessment of both current policies aimed to reduce crime and posited theories generated to explain it. Prompted by more sophisticated studies and understandings of crime as well as improved technological capabilities to capture and transmit incident information, the FBI instituted fundamental changes in the late 1980s for how the UCR would collect crime data (FBI, 2004). Currently the UCR is in the midst of undergoing this substantial conversion from its traditional summary-based system (the summary reporting system) to its new incident-based one, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).

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