Crime USA
More than 6,000 law enforcement agencies were missing from the FBI’s national crime data last year, representing nearly one-third of the nation’s 18,000 police agencies. This means a quarter of the U.S. population wasn't represented in the federal crime data last year, according to The Marshall Project’s analysis.
The old summary-level data reporting system, retired in 2021, was also revived last year when the FBI announced that it would accept data through it again. It’s unclear how many police agencies took advantage of the opportunity because the participation data is not available yet. But many states, like Illinois, had already planned to phase out the old system.
compared with 2021, the first year the FBI changed the collection system, with 2,000 more police agencies submitting their 2022 crime records. But the data gap still creates significant challenges for scholars and policymakers to make sense of crime trends.
Many of the largest police departments, like the NYPD and LAPD, are still missing.
Some large police departments began to report data to the FBI again in 2022, like the Miami-Dade Police Department. But the two largest police agencies in the U.S., the New York Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department, are still missing in the federal data.
A spokesperson from the LAPD said the department submitted crime data to the California Department of Justice using the old data collections system, but is still working on complying with the FBI’s new record standards. “The intent is to have it implemented by January 1, 2024 as part of the rollout of the new [Record Management] system,” the spokesperson said.
An NYPD spokesperson said the department is currently collecting crime data in compliance with the new system. “We anticipate that the agency will be NIBRS-certified in the very near future,” the spokesperson said, but didn’t offer a specific timeline.
Less than 10% of agencies in Florida and Pennsylvania are available in the national crime data, but many states have near-perfect submission rates.
Most police agencies do not submit data directly to the FBI. Instead, a police agency usually submits crime data to the state’s law enforcement department, which acts as a data clearinghouse. The state agency then submits data from all the agencies to the FBI.
In 2021, California and Florida were the only two states that were not certified with the FBI’s new data collection system on time, which meant neither state could submit any data at all by the FBI’s deadline. Starting in 2022, both states were certified to submit crime data through the FBI’s new system.
After both states began submitting data, nearly 400 California police agencies were included in the FBI’s crime data last year, which represents half of the state’s agencies. This was a significant jump from 2021, when only a handful of agencies in California that directly submitted their records to the FBI were in the federal database.
Ask Alison Whyte a question now
