THE ISSUE
The FBI implemented a new crime reporting system in January 2021, but as LNP | LancasterOnline’s Dan Nephin reported in Sunday’s “Lancaster Watchdog” column, thousands of police departments across the United States aren’t using the new National Incident-Based Reporting System, or NIBRS. And just a small fraction of Pennsylvania law enforcement agencies are using it. In Lancaster County, only the East Earl and East Lampeter police departments are using the new system. But the Pennsylvania State Police — which provides coverage to more than 20 of the county's 60 municipalities, mostly in the county’s southern and eastern parts — is not. As Nephin reported, “Police departments, both locally and across the country, cite funding, training and lack of technology as hurdles to adopting the feds’ new reporting system.”
If elected officials and law enforcement are to tackle crime effectively, they need to understand the scale and scope of it.
Data is essential. Uniform data is especially important. We must be able to compare apples to apples if government and law enforcement are going to be able to accurately detect trends, develop policy in response to those trends, and monitor progress — or failure — in addressing them.
Municipal and regional police departments in Lancaster County continue to report crime data to the Pennsylvania State Police, which is to pass it on to the FBI. “In fact,” Nephin noted, “police departments are required under Pennsylvania law to report crime statistics monthly or risk loss of funding and grant opportunities.”
But the FBI no longer accepts data in the form in which it used to be reported. This means data is not making its way to the federal agency.
“The Pennsylvania State Police hasn’t switched over to the new system yet, so police departments have been reporting data under the old summary reporting system,” Nephin reported.
State police Cpl. Brent Miller told Nephin in an email last week that his agency is “working on a software compatibility issue that was discovered with its vendor when data was submitted to the FBI.”
The state police, Miller said, “is taking the necessary steps to ensure the data is accurate and data pushes will resume in the coming months.”
Miller told Nephin that because reporting under the National Incident-Based Reporting System is voluntary, many local departments have been slow to adopt the new system.
But West Earl Township Police Chief Eric Higgins said this “is a state issue, not a local one.” The Pennsylvania State Police is supposed to be the clearinghouse for local crime data, the chief told Nephin via email.
Higgins said his officers were trained on the new system in July and the department’s record management system provider is awaiting certification by the state police.
We agree with Higgins: The onus is on the state police to get the new reporting system up and running. As quickly as possible. (The reporting process likely would be simpler if Pennsylvania didn’t have so many individual police departments, but that’s a subject for another day.)
This is not a trivial matter.
As Nephin explained in the “Lancaster Watchdog” column, the FBI in 1930 took over data collection from the nation’s police departments. The federal agency “issued reports through the Uniform Crime Reporting Program to provide information on homicide, rape, assault, burglary and robbery to law enforcement agencies, criminologists and the public.”
While crimes haven’t changed, data collection capabilities have, Nephin noted.
So the FBI developed “a more detailed system for collecting crime data from police departments across the country, a system intended to give a more thorough picture of crime in its annual Crime in the United States report.”
This effort yielded the National Incident-Based Reporting System.
“The transition to the richer, NIBRS-only data standard will provide greater context at the national level to allow the FBI and its contributing agencies to identify and address evolving crime issues,” the FBI wrote in response to LNP | LancasterOnline’s questions.
The National Incident-Based Reporting System “collects far more data than the previous system, such as victim and offender demographics, any relationship between offender and victim, whether multiple crimes were involved and weapon type,” Nephin reported. “It also collects details on where and when a crime occurred and whether it was solved.”
As the website of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit devoted to journalism about criminal justice, explains, nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country did not submit any data in 2021 to the FBI’s revised statistics collection program. This is “leaving a massive gap in information sure to be exploited by politicians in midterm election campaigns already dominated by public fear over a rise in violent crime.”
Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, described that information gap as “a mess.”
“It's not going to do the national debate over crime levels or crime solutions any good at all,” he told The Marshall Project.
This is precisely our concern.
Rosenfeld said the FBI might have prevented the national crime data crisis by keeping its previous system in place until enough agencies transitioned to the new one — which is an excellent point.
But that didn’t happen. So now we need the Pennsylvania State Police to work as quickly as possible to get with the new program.
The Marshall Project raised an issue that we hope is not at work in Pennsylvania: “Crime observers suspect large police departments may be wary of the new system precisely because it usually records slightly more crimes than the old one — not because there’s been a crime wave, but because the legacy system undercounted less serious crimes.”
We trust this is not factoring into the Pennsylvania State Police delay.
James Lynch, a criminology professor at the University of Maryland and former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, told The Marshall Project that criminologists won’t want to draw conclusions about crime when more than a third of the national data is missing. This would not be “malpractice necessarily,” he said, “but you don’t want to do that.”
Politicians won’t have any such reservations.
