National Incident-Based Reporting System (Nibrs)

There is a prevailing belief that the advancement of efficient and effective criminal justice policy requires an accurate picture of crime. The primary tool for assessing crime in America has been the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) since its inception during the 1930s. Criticism of the UCR began almost as soon as the program began. One of the most frequent concerns was how crimes were counted. The original purpose of the UCR was [Page 301]to provide a basis for comparison. This led to a measure of crime that, although it provided an easily comparable set of indexes, failed to provide in-depth information about specific incidents of crime that would be extremely useful to theorists, researchers, and the police themselves.

In an effort to bridge some of the gaps in the crime data, the FBI has attempted to broaden the utility of America's crime data with the implementation of the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The thrust of NIBRS is to replace the UCR summary system with an incident-based system, which will provide detail about the circumstances surrounding crimes. Whereas the UCR provided little more than frequency counts, the NIBRS system provides many details on each criminal incident. The ability to accurately identify when and where crime takes place and the characteristics of its victims and perpetrators is seen by many as an invaluable weapon in the war on crime. NIBRS data can be summarized easily to produce the types of indexes available with the UCR, but allow for much more detailed analyses. Of special interest to social scientists and policymakers is the ability to conduct detailed crime analyses within and across law enforcement jurisdictions. Regional law enforcement agencies can share information more easily, and strategic and tactical crime analyses can be made at the local and regional levels. Such data are essential to understanding the root causes of crime and to allocating resources to address crime problems. NIBRS data, because it contains information about the location of offenses, can be used with innovative crime-mapping technologies. Such maps are useful for identifying hot spots of crime, evaluating the effectiveness of strategic decision making, and looking for interactions between crime and other variables that have a known spatial component.

The transition from summary data collection to incident-based data is not complete at the national level. The FBI began accepting crime data in the NIBRS format in 1989, expecting national compliance by 1999. As of 2004, only 22 state-reporting programs were compliant. Although participation in the NIBRS program grows steadily, data are still not pervasive enough to make broad generalizations about crime in the United States. Poor coverage remains the biggest problem with NIBRS. However, several studies have demonstrated the value of NIBRS data. This growing number of research reports provides support for the argument that NIBRS is worth the effort and expense involved in its full implementation.