Establishing New Methods for Estimating Crime in the U.S.—The Transition to Incident-Based Crime Reporting through NIBRS

• In Event: Enhancing the Measurement of Crime in the U.S.

Abstract

As of January 1, 2021, the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) became the national standard for law enforcement crime data reporting in the U.S. The transition to NIBRS represents a significant shift – and improvement – in how reported crime is measured and estimated by the federal government. Since 2013, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has been supporting the NIBRS transition effort through the National Crime Statistics Exchange (NCS-X) initiative. One of the primary components of NCS-X is national crime estimation. To establish the appropriate statistical methods to successfully transition to NIBRS-based crime estimates, BJS and the FBI have been working in partnership on the National NIBRS Estimation Project (NNEP), a coordinated effort to develop national estimates of crime based on incident-based data reported by law enforcement agencies. This work has involved evaluating NIBRS coverage, developing imputation and weighting procedures, and identifying the key indicators of focus for reporting and tracking, all with the goal of establishing a prototype system that can ingest reported NIBRS data and generate national and state-level estimates of crime. This presentation will provide an overview on the work of the NNEP over the past several years, the accomplishments to date, efforts to evaluate the NIBRS data and determine implications of data quality and coverage for estimating crime at the state and national levels, and other estimation considerations. The presentation will also outline the key indicators estimated through the new system and a brief overview of recently released estimates.

Author

• Erica L Smith, Bureau of Justice Statistics