Working with NIBRS

JRSA NIBRS Week, Day 1 - NIBRS Data Quality and Lessons Learned
Staff from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and RTI discuss the current state of their work with data from the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). This webinar covers the following: 1) efforts to investigate the quality and completeness of NIBRS data, to assess the implications of data quality on coverage, estimates of bias, and the suitability of the data for generating national and state-level estimates on key indicators of crime; and, 2) lessons learned from working with NIBRS data, including how states can use the data to calculate state-level crime rates, ideas for standardizing the use and display of NIBRS data, and tools to facilitate use of NIBRS data by both seasoned and novice users.

Presentation Slides

JRSA NIBRS Week, Day 2 - Methods for Estimating Crime based on NIBRS
Staff from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) discuss the National NIBRS Estimation Project (NNEP), a joint effort with the FBI to establish the methodology necessary to estimate reported crime based on data reported by law enforcement to the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). This webinar provides an overview of the work of the NNEP over the past several years, the accomplishments to date, efforts to evaluate the NIBRS data and determine implications of data quality and coverage for estimating crime at the state and national levels, and other estimations considerations. The webinar also outlines key indicators to be estimated through the new system and the upcoming schedule for generating official crime estimates based on NIBRS data.

Presentation Slides

BJS NIBRS Extracts: An Introduction and How-To Guide Due to the size and complexity of incident-based crime data, working with NIBRS data often poses challenges to analysts. This webinar overviews the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ efforts to create NIBRS extract files that combine and concatenate the NIBRS segments. Extract files provide data users with publicly available data files that can be imported into widely available statistical software for analysis. The speakers present methods to translate the hierarchical NIBRS data structure, separated into eight segments, into extract files that can be analyzed at multiple units of analysis, such as a victim or offender-based analysis. The webinar discusses software and coding examples for creating the Bureau of Justice Statistics NIBRS extract files.

Presentation Slides