Introduction
The two main sources for crime data in the United States include the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The UCR program is a nationwide crime reporting system that most law enforcement agencies use to report crime data. The FBI administers the program in which the program focuses on collecting data about the volume and nature of crime across the country. Both systems gathers information about common offenses such as rape, arson, theft, burglary, murder, aggravated assault, and robbery that help the concerned stakeholders to engage in planning and research to understand the changing crime activities and the reaction of communities. In addition to collecting basic data on crimes, the system collects information about attacks directed at law enforcement officers, death of the officers, case clearances, and arrests.
The FBI uses the UCR combined data from all jurisdictions to create a nationwide crime report. The UCR system focuses on summary information about offenses based on the set rules including the hierarchy rule. The rule, nevertheless, limits the UCR system regarding further details of crimes, which together with other limitations led to the development of the NIBRS. The FBI designed the NIBRS to collect crimes data on all crimes happening in a single incident without being restricted by the hierarchy rule. NIBRS also collects detailed data regarding every crime within a specific jurisdiction. The NIBRS also expanded the number of crimes to be captured by including all the crimes that the UCR captured in addition to added types of crimes. For example, the system collects data on each crime and arrest for 24 crimes groups comprising of 52 specific offenses or Group A crimes. These crimes comprise of all Part I Index crimes of the UCR besides other additional crimes. For each crime, NIBRS collects detailed information. The system also collects arrest information for Group B crimes. The two groups are based on the importance and seriousness of the crimes, their prevalence across the country, and their occurrence volume or frequency.
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Policy makers use data from UCR and NIBRS to inform their decisions and design adequate responses to crimes. For instance, the data can be used to shape community policing initiatives, develop allocation formulas for specific criminal justice grant programs to help in fighting crime, or offer recommendations regarding the additional resources law enforcement agencies require to fight crime effectively. It is vital to examine how UCR and NIBRS collect crime data and how the two techniques compare to each other given the significance of crime statistics in allocating funding and in shaping policy.
The present paper compares and contrasts the two main sources of crime data in the United States, which include UCR and NIBRS. In comparing and contrasting, the paper will focus on the methodological procedures and implications between the two crime data sources.
Collecting Data
The Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) was developed in 1927 to collect crime data consistently and uniformly. The initial collection procedure was disorganized as it involved individual states, regions, and cities collecting data for their locations (U.S. Department of Justice, 2019). The aim of UCR is to produce a reliable crime data to help law enforcement agencies in their operations. UCR is the dominant crime indicator as it has offered crime data to the media, municipal planners, legislators, sociologists, and criminologists to be used for planning and research. Law enforcement agencies originally considered the UCR to be the main crime data tool. The realization regarding the importance of the collected data for policy and planning purposes created the need for more detailed data. The main shortcoming of UCR concerned its lack of detailed information about the collected data (U.S. Department of Justice, 2019). The concerned stakeholders including the FBI later developed the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to address those shortcomings. NIBRS became active during the late 1980s and law enforcement agencies were using the technique to collect crime data by 2013. The objectives of NIBRS include to consider the timeliness, quality, and quantity of the collected data and to use effective techniques to compile, analyze, audit, and publish the collected information. NIBRS produces detailed, meaningful, and accurate crime statistics than UCR.
UCR reports data on five elements for each of the seven categorized index crimes. The elements include the number of clearances concerning people under 18 years of age only, the number of crimes cleared through exceptional or arrest techniques, unfounded complaints, the number of real crimes including attempted ones, and police reported or identified crimes including unfounded crimes and attempts. UCR also collects data about weapons involved in aggravated assault, robbery, and murder. Police differentiate attempts from completed crimes for forcible rape only (United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2004). Both NIBRS and UCR report murder as aggravated assault. Both count each violent crime victim. For instance, both systems would report two aggravated assaults if a single offender carrying a weapon harms two victims simultaneously during an assault. Table 1 shows the comparison between UCR and NIBRS.
Table 1: UCR vs NIBRS
Source: https://americansecuritytoday.com/5-reasons-law-enforcement-orgs-should-be-nibrs-compliant-asap/
The UCR mainly uses the offenses-known data collection technique that gathers crime statistics every month. Law enforcement agencies tally the number of known crimes for each Part I crimes and arrest information for Part I and Part II crimes before submitting the collected data in aggregate form every month for offenses such as arson, vehicle theft, larceny, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, rape and murder (Table 2 shows crimes in Part I and Part II). The data also includes Part II crimes such as prostitution and gambling, but these crimes are not part of the approved crime index (United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2004). The hierarchy rule is used to tabulate the offenses-known information. Using the hierarchy rule, UCR reports only serious crimes in incidents involving different crimes (Targonski, 2011). While this offers valuable data, it is not comprehensive because of the use of the rule. The rule demonstrates that the index should report only the most severe incident, which obscures the real number of the committed offenses. For instance, for an event involving an offender breaking into a house, taking the owner’s belongings at gun point, and then shooting and killing the owner, UCR using the hierarchy rule would record only the most severe crime, which would be murder. In turn, this fails to depict accurately what happened in reality. Besides, it is possible that petty crimes or the less severe crimes might be increasing in a specific location but the UCR report fails to reflect this because of the hierarchy rule.
Table 2: Part 1 and II Crimes
Source: FBI.org
Additionally, the UCR does not truly indicate the level of criminality since it is upwardly driven by the most recorded offense, which is usually burglary or larceny (Rantala & Edwards, 2000). The high number of this crime overshadows other severe crime but that are committed less frequently, which in turn leads to biases against locations encountering more larceny related crimes but less number of other severe offenses such as forcible rapes and murder (Felson, 2018). The use of the hierarchy rule also means that agencies leave specific crimes. The left offenses represent the other side of crime and can create issues for being unreported. For instance, the failure to report some crimes limits the criminal justice system from fully applying its deterrent ability by protecting criminals from law enforcement action (Felson, 2018). Unreported crimes also lead to unequal resource allocation including equipment and manpower and affects the role of police since officers do not recognize specific crimes in their jurisdictions (Felson, 2018). Police officer might therefore ignore handling these issues. Failure to report may also adversely affect crime victims because of the criminal justice system not officially identifying them, which may create issues such as the victims being ineligible for different supportive programs from different agencies (Felson, 2018). Besides, lack of records for specific crimes also affect the crime costs, which negatively affects victim compensation programs (Felson, 2018). The hierarchy rule also poses an additional problem of measurement error and inadequate coverage. Recording only serious crimes in incidents biases crime rate downward. This issue is particularly vital for jurisdictions experiencing less crime rates. Exaggerated crime rates may emerge from these locations based on the two systems. For instance, if an area experiences two robberies in which only robbery occurred together with murder, it would just count a single robbery using UCR. If the area uses NIBRS, it would count two crimes, which will indicate a difference of 100 percent even though the real number differed by one. In such cases, the use of actual numbers instead of differences in percentages would be more suitable.
The NIBRS technique does not aggregate data but submits information for each criminal incident to the FBI separately (Anderson, 2015).NIBRS data collection methodology does not apply the hierarchy rule but entails collecting details for each event and additional specific crimes. The collected details include data about bias/hate motivation, offender drug or alcohol use, day time, place, and weapons. NIBRS also differentiates attempts from completed offenses for all crimes and reports all crimes in incidents involving different crimes. A single incident may have different crimes. The NIBRS system considers an incident to be one or more crimes that the same offender or several offenders acting jointly at the same place and time commit. Joint action occurs when all the offenders contribute or actually crime commission in an incident. The system also requires offenders to consent to and be aware of crime commission. If they do not consent, their action contributes to crime commission (Felson, 2018). NIBRS, therefore considers all offenders involved in an incident to be involved in the commission of all crimes in the incident. If some of the offenders did not work with the others, the system counts more than one incident. In turn, this enables the technique to offer a complete, correct, and factual incident report, which enables researchers to analyze and compare different incidents (National Institute of Justice, 2009). The UCR system lacks a clear indicator to report whether the offense was completed or was an attempt. The lack of clarity could lead to issues when analyzing whether crimes were completed or they were stopped before being accomplished.
Both indexes determine the number of crimes and the financial value of stolen property using the gathered data about the stolen property. The information gathered here entails vehicle recovery, the nature of larcenies, day or night, whether the robbery was nonresidential or occurred in a residence, and the location of the robbery. The UCR reporting system allows agencies to only document limited information for 10 crimes besides the extra 20 crime in which only arrests data are recorded. UCR only includes the last two categories. UCR focuses mostly on traditional street crimes such as burglary and assault while it fails to sufficiently include other severe crimes such as corporate crime as highlighted by its focus on collecting crime statistic for crimes against persons and property while leaving out crimes against society. NIBRS, nevertheless, allows an agency to collect detailed information for 52 crimes in addition to 10 extra crimes in which the agency can report only arrests data (Felson, 2018). Additionally, the crimes in NIBRS are categorized into three incident groups, which include offenses against society, offenses against property, and offenses against persons. Crimes in the offenses against society category include prostitution, pornography, gambling violations, and drug crimes. The inclusion of detailed information compared to the UCR, however, makes the NIBRS model to be complex to analysts and researchers who find it challenging to work with the detailed data.
Table 3: UCR Part I Crimes and NIBRS Group A Crimes
Source: FBI.org
For victims and offenders, NIBRS collects details such as race, sex, and age while noting the relationship of the victim to the criminal regardless of the crime. Other details include the value, description, type, and recovery of property; quantity and type of drugs; and the number of vehicles stolen and recovered (Anderson, 2015). UCR only include this information for murder and only provides a tally of the incidents without giving information about each recorded incident (United States Federal Bureau of Investigations, 2004). The NIBRS reporting system enables agencies to collect fine details of incidents, which leads to clear, precise, and better crime description. NIBRS does not collect aggregate counts based on the category of the crime. The data collection technique here involves collecting detailed data based on the crime incident where data on offender property and arrest data, victim, and the crime are recorded. NIBRS assigns each incident a number that represents all the data pertaining to the incident.
Crime Classification
NIBRS and UCR classify or define various crimes differently. For instance, UCR first considers justifiable homicide to be murder, then to be unfounded (United States Federal Bureau of Investigations, 2004). In contrast, NIBRS considers justifiable homicide separate from manslaughter and murder (Rantala & Edwards, 2000). Both indexes do not include justifiable homicide in their total counts to avoid influencing homicide statistics. In forcible rape, NIBRS considers male targets of female offenders, which affects the number of forcible rape by recording high rate of the crime.
The hierarchy rule involving single-victim events does not affect assault since assault is fundamental to all violent crimes. Other crimes that the hierarchy rule excludes include human trafficking involving involuntary servitude and human trafficking involving commercial sex acts (United States Federal Bureau of Investigations, 2004). Both indexes also define aggravated assault equally. They only differ in their recording and classification. For instance, UCR gathers assault data in five groups including cutting tools or knife; firearm; other dangerous weapon; feet, fists, hands; and other. While the availability of a weapon designates aggravated assault, it may be misclassified to be simple assault if an event leads to minor injuries without data regarding the weapon. UCR does not offer data regarding simple assault even though the crime is the most dominant domestic violence crime. Misclassification leads to classification errors, which results in the deflation or inflation of crime statistics. The extensive use of UCR data over the years underscores the significance of ensuring its preciseness (Nolan, Haas, Lester, Kirby & Jira, 2006). Studies identify the UCR to be based on statistics because it is not a real representation of all offenses that happen in a specific location (Nolan et al., 2006). The system is also prone to classification errors that occur when law enforcement agencies document incident facts correctly but misclassify the type of the offense (Nolan et al., 2006). Classification errors may emerge due to different reasons including officers deliberately downgrading specific offenses to decrease the rate of crimes, simple officer mistakes, and bad writing habits shared by officers.
The uniform definitions and the guidelines of the UCR system contribute to the classification errors also. For example, every jurisdiction have their individual criminal statutes, which compels agencies in those places to address the issue of the need to translate their statutes to UCR offense groups. Some jurisdictions consider burglary to only involve breaking and entering in which larceny can be documented if property theft was involved. Other jurisdictions require officers to record every crime that can be charged. UCR defines robbery to be a combination of larceny and assault, which create classification error opportunities when one of the two offenses is unclear. UCR also defines burglary to include larceny as its element, which can be mistaken for larceny in situations where it is challenging to determine unlawful entry. Besides, some law enforcement agencies may consider larceny to be more significant than the theft of vehicles in the hierarchy. The UCR, nevertheless, classify larceny and vehicle theft incidents to be vehicle theft (United States Federal Bureau of Investigations, 2004). These examples illustrate the sources of classification errors in UCR. Classification errors can substantially affect the accuracy of the UCR data, the decisions made based on UCR data, and the conclusions that emerge from the data.
NIBRS categorizes assault into three groups including intimidation, simple, and aggravated. The index then collect these features based on the incident while also collecting extensive weapon data, which helps in addressing misclassification issues (Rantala & Edwards, 2000). The hotel rule in NIBRS is expanded to include temporary rental storage facilities in which it records a robbery as a single crime if different dwelling units controlled by a single manager are burglarized and the manager instead of the tenants reports the incident to the police (Rantala & Edwards, 2000). UCR records each robbery separately. In turn, this leads to lower rate of burglaries in NIBRs than in UCR, which highlights the frequency of this robbery. The hotel rule presents some issues for UCR by biasing burglary rates because UCR must record burglary as a single crime if many burglaries occur in a dwelling with different residences. The issue raised here is that some cities lack the same percentage of multi-family or transient housing. Using the hotel rule would bias burglary rates downward for resort areas, for example, compared to places with mainly single-family houses.
NIBRS expands the ability of agencies to document information regarding specific incidents, which allows leaders to fully understand crimes. Policy makers can consider only the NIBRS data or combine it with other data and examine them to obtain a vivid view of crimes and criminal activities in communities. NIBRS also assists law enforcement agencies to collect better evidence, which they can use to design effective practices and solutions. The challenge that faces NIBRS is the issue of human error. The many categories and more reporting data in NIBRS than in UCR means that agencies documenting data are prone to misidentification and categorization errors among other issue. Both indexes, however, have the issue of human error because they both involve human input, even though it is more pronounced in NIBRS than in UCR.
Being an incident-based system, NIBRS includes more details when reporting crimes. The unit of analysis in UCR include the reporting agencies, which allows analysts to get total crime counts on a county or city level while moving up to the regional or state level. It is challenging to get data about individual offenses, criminals, or victims when using UCR. The NIBRS, nevertheless, uses crime incident as the unit of analysis. Additionally, NIBRS categorizes the collected data into six groups related to the incident including arrestee, offender, victim, property, crime, and administrative. Each group has detailed information about each incident, such as time or day for the incident and incident number under the administrative segment; age and sex under the offender segment, and value of property and the type of property under the property segment.
Crime Reporting
Both systems offer official crime data that the police report. The reported data is mainly obtained from people reporting crimes to the police (Mosher, Miethe & Hart, 2011). People have a higher likelihood of reporting crimes to law enforcement agencies if they have the habit of interacting with police positively in past reported cases (Anderson, 2015). The most underreported crime is rape and this is because of factors such as the crime being emotionally disturbing and the victim experiencing posttraumatic stress symptoms (Figley, 2013) The crime statistics in both systems encompass a function of the recording and reporting police practices, which may fail to represent all the committed offenses. Offenses that happen but are not reported to the police represent the dark figure of crime. Offenses such as shoplifting may not be detected while people who are victims of a crime or witnesses to a crime may not report. Besides, law enforcement agencies have official and unofficial view of the information that the public provide. The (UCR) crime reporting procedures are lightly related to the provided instructions, which raises the issue of the lack of standardization regarding crime reporting and recording. Additionally, the programs or the FBI do not offer feedback about the accuracy of police reporting except in cases where discrepancies are noted.
Crime reports from people are the main determinant of both programs because the systems depends on offenses that bystanders and victims report to the police. While the programs include both people reported crimes and police discovered crimes, the recorded crimes by the police mainly depends on victim reporting as most police agencies have a tendency to be reactive (Anderson, 2015). Several organizational, political, economic, social, and individual factors influence the reporting of offenses by people. For example, lack of an understanding of crime reporting procedures, having low confidence in law enforcement agencies, and the thinking that law enforcement agencies would not do anything are some of the factors that influence citizen’s failure to report crimes (Anderson, 2015). Other factors include self-help, association between offenders and victims, reporting by third parties, seriousness, demographics, attitude toward law enforcement, victim culpability, efficacy and obligation, and insurance (Anderson, 2015). People are more likely to report serious crimes than less serious crimes (Goudriaan, 2006). People also report crimes if reporting is required to claim insurance benefits. Some people act as good and responsible citizen and report crime. Another vital factor is the victim’s spoiled identity and culpability since a victim without past crime history can comfortably report a crime. While attitude to the law enforcement does not affect reporting, mutual hostility prevents citizens from reaching to the police (Goudriaan, 2006). Additionally, educated people, African-Americans, the elderly, and women have been found to have a higher likelihood of reporting crimes compared to young people, men, less educated people, and whites.
The reporting is also influenced by the association between victims and offenders in which people are more likely to report crimes by non-strangers. Other factors such as the safety of other people, retribution, and self-protection also offer incentives concerning crime reporting by the people (Goudriaan, 2006). The cost of reporting is another critical factor when people make the decision to call the police. Factors that increase the cost of calling the police include opportunity cost, engagement in illegal activities, failure to send criminal for prosecution, particularly concerning domestic violence, and concerns regarding reprisal and stigmatization (Goudriaan, 2006). Some people do not report crimes to the police because of privacy needs, the need to protect offenders, and concerns regarding reprisals. Factors that encourage people to call the police include the need for self-protection, views regarding the incident seriousness, and views that the law-enforcement consider incidents to be severe. Social environment factors also influence the decision to report crimes (Goudriaan, 2006). Factors such as socioeconomic disadvantage, confidence in the effectiveness of law enforcement, and social cohesion influence the decision whether or not to report crimes to law enforcement.
Crime Categorization
Additionally, both techniques are categorized into groups according to what occurred in an event. Both techniques document offenses, even though the UCR categorizes crimes into parts while the NIBRS categorizes them into groups. The UCR divides crimes into two parts, which include Part I crimes that include crimes such as robbery and murder arranged hierarchically from the most serious to the least serious; and Part II crimes that include less serious crimes such as prostitution, vandalism, and larceny. (United States Bureau of Investigations 15-39). NIBRS, nevertheless, does not include hierarchies and categorizes crimes in Group A and B (See table 4). Group A has 46 various crimes categorized into 22 crime groups and includes the most dominant crimes that include all Part I UCR crimes besides others (See table 3). Group B has 11 various crimes that are the less dominant such as bad checks and curfew violations. Crimes in NIBRS are recorded alphabetically in which law enforcement agencies must submit incident reports containing data from all data segments for Group A crimes (Felson, 2018). The agencies, however, must submit only arrest reports containing information from the arrestee segment for Group B crimes. The FBI had to develop definitions for offenses covered by NIBRS only and change definitions for offenses covered by the UCR only due to the expanded list of offenses in NIBRS. Examples include definitions for rapes. The two systems thus differ in the way they define and report specific crimes. For instance, NIBRS reporting use updated definitions of specific offenses such as rape and homicide (Rantala & Edwards, 2000). For instance, UCR technique consider rape or legacy rape to involve only female victims without including male victims and only considers male as the perpetrators. UCR also requires the use of force in its definition. NIBRS, however, considers both female and male victims and female and male offenders. In the NIBRS definition, force may or may not be involved.
Table 4: NIBRS Group A and B Crimes
Source: FBI.org
Conclusion
The present paper reviewed two data collection techniques in the criminology sector. The UCR is the dominant data collection system that law enforcement agencies use to record crime statistics. NIBRS was created to offer extra data, particularly concerning victims and crime incidents that the UCR system did not provide. Based on its design, the NIBRS program focuses on different crime aspects than UCR. For example, while UCR handles the general number of index crime incidents, NIBRS handles both the incident numbers and the occurrence of each kind of crime in the incident. This enables NIBRS to offer additional details regarding crimes that happen during crime commissioning without reporting high rates of crimes for most situations. Both programs are prone to reporting errors in which reporting errors affect UCR system while non-uniform reporting issues affect NIBRS. UCR reporting errors happen mainly due to the misclassification of crimes that lead to the undercounting or over-counting of specific crimes such as aggravated assault. These errors also emerge due to the misapplication of the hierarchy rule for crimes, particularly theft of vehicles. NIBRS is designed to automatically address the reporting issues. Notable differences were observed between the two instruments. For instance, while UCR record arrests in specific incidents only, NIBRS records arrest data in every incident. Besides, the UCR system only offers a tally of incidents without detailed data on each recorded incident. NIBRS collects data on every incident including offender and victim features and the relationship between them, location of incident, arrests made, committed crimes, used weapons, and any injuries at the scene. Additionally, the UCR technique is restricted to summary estimate of Part I offenses, which adversely affects the use of data obtained using the technique in research purposes to examine how Part I crimes and Part II crimes converge. While NIBRS was designed to address this issues, the program is still not widely used.
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