FBINIBRS

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 United States. The transition to NIBRS represents a significant shift – and improvement – in how reported crime is measured and estimated by the federal government.

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Since 1930, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program has collected information about crimes known to and arrests made by law enforcement. The UCR Summary Reporting System (SRS) collected monthly counts of the number of crimes known to law enforcement from thousands of agencies throughout the United States. Information on the number of crimes known was recorded for ten offense categories, based on the most serious offense reported for each crime incident:

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In addition, the SRS collected counts of arrests only for an additional set of offense categories, broken down by the age, sex, and race of the arrestee.

NIBRS data more accurately reflect the types of crime addressed by police agencies, like simple assault, animal cruelty, destruction of property, intimidation, and identity theft. The broad scope of the information collected in NIBRS will greatly improve the nation’s understanding of crime and public safety.

In 1982, BJS and the FBI sponsored a study of the UCR Program, with the objective of revising the program to meet the changing needs of law enforcement moving into the 21st century. This effort to provide more comprehensive and detailed crime statistics, which proposed the development and implementation of a new data collection, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).