IBRRC and Incident-Based Reporting Resource Center over data vis light blue background with red data points

History of NIBRS

1929 – Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR)

Under the UCR, crime data were collected using the Summary Reporting System (SRS), which enabled the FBI to compile and report information on specific crime categories. Since its inception, the UCR has aided with measuring the incidence and prevalence of crime in the United States, making it a vital resource for law enforcement, policymakers, researchers, and the public. While revolutionary at the time, the SRS contained several structural constraints that limited its ability to capture the complexity of criminal incidents. For example, the SRS collected information on the offense and arrest for only 10 Part I crimes and arrest-only information for 29 Part II crimes. Further limiting the data collection is the hierarchy rule, which limits reporting to only the most serious offense within a single criminal incident.

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1970s – International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) called for a review of the UCR program

Due to these limitations with the UCR and SRS, in the late 1970s, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) called for a review of the UCR program. In response to this and other concerns, the FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) formed a joint task force to explore changing the program.

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1980s – National Incident-Based System (NIBRS) Framework Created

The framework for the National Incident-Based System (NIBRS) was born out of the work of this task force. It was published in The Blueprint for the Future of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (Poggio, Kennedy, Chaiken, and Carlson, 1985). The objectives of this new system were to improve and expand data collection, data quality, and analytic capabilities of the law enforcement community. In the late 1980s, Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) began transitioning to NIBRS.

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2012 – BJS Funds the National Crime Statistics Exchange (NCS-X) Initiative

BJS funded the National Crime Statistics Exchange (NCS-X) Initiative to study the feasibility of producing national estimates of reported crime that included offense details and characteristics. While NIBRS captured the necessary crime elements to generate these estimates, its collection was not comprehensive on a national level. These initial efforts demonstrated that NIBRS data could be utilized to generate national estimates of reported crime using a sample-based strategy for expanding the number of reporting agencies. See BJS’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS)

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2013 – NCS-X Implementation

BJS and the FBI partnered to implement NCS-X with the following goals:

      • expanding the number of law enforcement agencies contributing crime data to NIBRS
      • developing the statistical methodology to describe the details and context of crime across the United States.

NCS-X was implemented in two phases. Phase One focused on obtaining incident-based crime data by expanding coverage of the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), while Phase Two focused on developing statistical estimation procedures that provide a national picture of the details and context of crime. See BJS’s National Crime Statistics Exchange (NCS-X).

NCS-X Phase 1
When NCS-X was created, only about 25% of the nation’s roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies contributed data to NIBRS. While the data collected through NIBRS was ideal for the NCS-X, agency participation rates did not meet the minimum requirements for quantifying crime on a national level.

In response, several strategies were discussed, such as (a) providing police agencies with free supported software to extract and transmit an agency’s Record Management System (RMS) data in NIBRS format (or a data-entry system if an RMS does not exist), (b) including personal identifiers of arrestees, and (c) allowing police agencies to access national data for routine police work.1

NCS-X Phase 2
FBI and Department of Justice statisticians use advanced methodologies to estimate national crime statistics when a particular state or locality doesn’t provide NIBRS data or provides data that does not meet the criteria to be published. While communities that have not transitioned may be missing data for a year or two, estimates will still allow people to understand crime patterns and national trends. BJS determined it could produce national estimates of NIBRS data by enrolling a scientifically selected sample of 400 law enforcement agencies to submit data in addition to the agencies already participating in NIBRS.

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2018 – National Estimation Begins

A detailed description is available on BJS’s National Crime Statistics Exchange (NCS-X) webpage. It also includes:

        • Information about the NCS-X sample of agencies that are the basis for national statistical estimation purposes.
        • Description of the membership and work performed by the NCS-X Technical Assistance Team
        • Resources for state UCR programs and law enforcement agencies
        • Links to NCS-X publications

 

 

  1. Bierie, D. M. (2015). Enhancing the National Incident–Based Reporting System: A Policy Proposal. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 59(10), 1125-1143. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306624X14525926