With the 2024 presidential election fast approaching, violent crime is among the top issues for voters.
FBI data released in late September show violent crime in the U.S. declined an estimated 3% in 2023 compared to the year before. Murder and non-negligent manslaughter dropped almost 12%.
But some people online have suggested the FBI statistics aren’t reliable because law enforcement agencies in many large cities didn’t report their crime data to the FBI.
“What if I told you that participation in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program is completely voluntary and starting in 2021, 37% of police departments stopped reporting crime data to the FBI, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York,” a viral post on X says.
A reader also asked us to VERIFY if the FBI’s 2023 crime data excludes many large U.S. cities.
THE QUESTION
Does the FBI’s 2023 crime data exclude many large cities?
THE SOURCES
- FBI spokesperson
- FBI UCR Summary of Crime in the Nation 2023
- Brennan Center for Justice article on FBI crime data published in October 2022
- Charis Kubrin, Ph.D., professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine
- Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst and cofounder of the data analytics firm AH Datalytics
- The Congressional Research Service
THE ANSWER
No, the FBI’s 2023 crime data does not exclude many large cities.
WHAT WE FOUND
Most large cities in the U.S., including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, reported their 2023 crime data to the FBI.
The false claims likely stem from gaps in reported crime data due to changes the FBI implemented in 2021.
Some law enforcement agencies, including those in large cities, didn’t report their 2021 crime data because they were unable to comply with new FBI requirements. But in 2022, the FBI made it easier for more agencies to participate in its crime reporting program.
The FBI has collected data on crimes reported to law enforcement since 1930 through its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program.
Though federal agencies are required to report their data, state and local law enforcement agencies voluntarily participate in the program, a spokesperson for the FBI told VERIFY.
More than 16,000 law enforcement agencies, or 85.2% of those enrolled in the FBI’s UCR Program, submitted data in 2023, according to the FBI. These agencies cover 94.3% of the U.S. population.
Every city agency covering a population of at least 1 million people, which includes New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, contributed a full year of data to the FBI in 2023, the spokesperson said.
Eighty-four out of 90 agencies covering a population of at least 250,000 also reported a full year of data in 2023, crime data analyst Jeff Asher confirmed to VERIFY.
It is true that smaller law enforcement agencies are more likely to not report their data, “but that doesn’t mean that a ton of rural crimes are being missed in national estimates,” Asher wrote in June 2024.
When agencies don’t report their crime data, the FBI still “estimates their totals using historical reporting patterns,” he said.
Why there were gaps in FBI crime data in 2021
The FBI has historically used two systems to collect crime data: the Summary Reporting System (SRS), which is the older of the two, and the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
While the SRS is “easy to use,” it tends to “gloss over important nuances,” experts with the Brennan Center for Justice explained in a 2022 article. For example, it only counts “the most serious offense in an incident, applying a ‘hierarchy rule’ to determine which offenses were more serious than others,” they said.
The Brennan Center experts used a hypothetical incident to explain what this means. If a robbery victim was injured in an attack and died, the incident would only be recorded as a murder under the SRS, they said. The robbery would not be counted in the FBI data.
NIBRS, on the other hand, “tracks information in much greater detail than the SRS and covers many additional types of crimes,” according to the Brennan Center experts. It also abandons the SRS “hierarchy rule,” allowing law enforcement to report multiple offenses in a single incident, they said.
Under NIBRS, both the robbery and murder in the hypothetical incident above “would be counted along with considerable details about both offenses,” according to the Brennan Center experts.
The FBI had previously accepted crime data in both formats. But, on Jan. 1, 2021, the FBI stopped accepting data through SRS, according to the Brennan Center experts.
This required “major changes” for law enforcement agencies that had yet to make the switch to NIBRS, Asher explained.
As a result, only 65% of the nation’s population was covered by a NIBRS-compliant agency when the 2021 data was collected. That means crime estimates for that year were based on less than two-thirds of the nation’s population, according to Asher.
“When I write about crime data…I basically say I’m leaving 2021 numbers in there, but we’re not talking about it because it has an asterisk and we don’t trust them,” Asher told VERIFY.
Law enforcement agencies in large cities like New York, Los Angeles and Miami were among those that didn’t participate in 2021 crime data reporting amid the FBI overhaul.
During that period, the FBI had to use “extensive estimation to handle the reporting of some of these large jurisdictions,” Charis Kubrin, Ph.D., a professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine, said.
But, in 2022, the FBI said it would accept SRS data again. That’s why participation in the FBI’s crime data reporting program returned to higher levels beginning in 2022.
“To provide nationally representative data, the FBI accepts Summary Reporting System (SRS) data from agencies that have not yet transitioned to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS),” the FBI spokesperson said.
FBI crime data has limitations but is still reliable
The FBI data has various limitations due in part to the lack of a mandatory reporting requirement and the absence of data on crimes that people do not report to law enforcement, Kubrin and Asher noted.
At least one other data source, the National Crime Victimization Survey, allows for an estimation of the number and types of crimes that are not reported to the police.
The FBI does have checks in place to ensure the accuracy and quality of the data.
For example, the FBI says it edits and reviews individual agencies’ reports for “completeness and quality.” The FBI also conducts audits of each state’s UCR data collection procedures once every three years.
Despite its limitations, Kubrin said she still believes the FBI crime data “has enough merit and validity to be able to use it to answer a variety of questions.” Asher agrees.
“For the most part, with the exception of 2021 when they were undergoing the NIBRS transition, the FBI data is the closest we have to an accurate, precise count of the number of reported crimes each year,” Asher said.