Availability of Crime Statistics with the Retirement of Summary UCR Data by the FBI: Challenges and Solutions for Evaluation

• In Event: NIJ-Day: Multilevel Evaluation of Project Safe Neighborhoods

Abstract

One of the primary goals of the evaluation is to document PSN’s impact on violent crime across all of the nation’s 94 US Attorney districts. To accomplish this, it is essential for the evaluation team to be able to access consistently reported data on violent crime for all local jurisdictions across the country as efficiently as possible. While the type of violent crime data needed for the evaluation has traditionally been available through the FBI’s Unified Crime Reporting (UCR) program, recent changes to the UCR program present significant challenges for the PSN evaluation effort. Simply put, the retirement of the UCR’s summary reporting system (SRS) by the FBI effective January 1, 2021, coupled with the currently incomplete transition to NIBRS reporting by LEAs nationwide, means that consistently reported violent crime data will no longer be available on a nationwide basis through a single source such as the FBI for any time period beyond the 2020 calendar year. In this presentation, we discuss these challenges in detail, along with solutions our evaluation team has developed that can help current and future evaluations that rely on crime statistics.

Authors

• Roger Przybylski, Justice Research and Statistics Association

• Kristina Lugo-Graulich, Justice Research and Statistics Association