Modernizing Crime Statistics: Report 2 New Systems for Measuring Crime (2018) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix D: Remaining Methodology and Implementation Issues for Modern Crime Statistics
Appendix D: Remaining Methodology and Implementation Issues for Modern Crime Statistics
Pages 159-182
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From page 159... ...
. We also describe what has been done to remove those barriers to change in national crime statistics.
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From page 160... ...
Combining data from multiple state administrative departments, or from the courts, will involve managing patchworks of standards and sets of competing interests, as was the case in NIBRS. The second reason for commentary is that we envision police-report data to continue to be an important, primary source of national crime statistics in our ideal, modernized crime data infrastructure.
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From page 161... ...
The NCS-X work has also been important in level-setting and taking stock of the current information management systems capacity among many state and local law enforcement agencies. But most fundamentally it represents the hint, and hopefully the start, of concerted national-level engagement in the compilation of national crime statistics -- an active stance toward the production of crime statistics rather than a more passive, aggregation stance, and one consistent with our call for strong coordination and governance in Chapter 3.
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From page 162... ...
Many of the barriers to more rapid NIBRS adoption can be most succinctly summarized as local agencies being -- for a variety of reasons -- simply unwilling or unable to make the switch. Decomposing the unwilling side first, the most commonly voiced barrier to NIBRS implementation, by the local law enforcement executives who would be responsible for it, is probably the apprehension about the appearance of crime rate "spikes" in their jurisdictions due to the counting of multiple offenses in crime incidents: that is, through elimination of the Hierarchy Rule by which only a single offense is recorded.
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From page 163... ...
Related to this barrier, we will argue in Section D.2 for positioning attention to data quality and integrity as a critical part of the value-added benefits by contribution to national crime statistics. This, too, is an area in which the NCS-X sample -- and, finally, analyses making use of real data -- will help greatly.
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From page 164... ...
(Through more research on NIBRS data, the broader public may also obtain benefits of added intelligence about crime -- for instance, in the form of more useful demographic/geographic offense rates or the estimation of probabilities of victimization for at-risk populations.) Agencies that have had the wherewithal to devote in-house data analyst time to their own data resources -- in some cases, either directly publishing crime statistics on the Internet or enabling the open, public mapping of crime events -- might be particularly well poised to exploit the benefits of comparison/contrast with peer agencies based on nationally compiled data.
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From page 165... ...
• As we suggested in Appendix B, a small law enforcement agency without a sophisticated information management system (and so wholly unprepared for rapid conversion) could fairly view the completion of even the simple UCR Summary forms as a major task of intricate bookkeeping.
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From page 166... ...
But, as support for assertions such as the law enforcement information management systems vendor space being complex yet still relatively small in size -- it is appropriate to mention that solution providers that came up in our meetings include: Motorola (including subsidiary Spillman Technologies, which branches more into crime data analysis and mapping) , Integraph, COPLINK (originally a joint venture of the University of Arizona and the Tucson Police Department, now developed by IBM's i2 subsidiary)
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From page 167... ...
So there is a great distance to be traveled before national crime statistics collection through automated, direct harvest of state and local records is possible. Reducing the dimensionality of the problem by focusing on the unique individual constraints and demands on information systems vendors is an important step, just as reducing dimensionality by coordination with states is essential for coordinating the inflow of crime data.
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From page 168... ...
and the evolving Crime Data Explorer portal for dissemination. A final major barrier is related to the cost-benefit assessment that underlies the generation of call or incident reports by law enforcement officers in the first place; it is the perception that more detailed, NIBRS-type reporting would take more time than "what we do now" in local departments, keeping officers from their duties on the streets and writing reports instead.
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From page 169... ...
We are heartened through our discussions with practitioners, and those who have gone through the conversion to fully electronic reporting, that this is a general area in which local agency culture is continuing to evolve: Our sense is that report writing is increasingly seen by local law enforcement agencies as an indicator of their quality and effectiveness, and so improving it and training for it is growing in importance (ideally, with generation of the material for crime statistics as a transparent by-product)
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From page 170... ...
The first serious attention to the FBI's imputation routines appears to have come about when BJS was called upon to develop formulas for allocating Local Law Enforcement Block Grant Program funds -- tied to UCR totals -- by law in 1994. Following the law's guidelines, BJS analyzed raw crime data provided to the national UCR program, but quickly found that 19 percent of the 18,413 "contributing" agencies in the relevant time period (36 months, 1992–1994)
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From page 171... ...
At the national UCR-program level, the existing routines that have been deployed to detect problems in UCR Summary data (Akiyama and Propheter, 2005) are reasonable approaches: • Cross-sectional outlier detection, or comparing an agency's report to similar agencies based on population size, urbanization, agency type, and geographic location; • Longitudinal outlier detection, or detecting seriously aberrant counts in an agency's reports over time; and • Proportionality outlier detection, or examination of deviations from stratum distribution on a number of issues (weapon distributions; proportion of simple and aggravated assault; distribution of monetary loss in property crimes; proportion of violent to property crimes)
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From page 172... ...
would be compiled by the state UCR program and reviewed by FBI staff "over a three-day period" at the state agency.6 • A Service/Qualitative Review would be an "optional add-on" to the first audit type, in which the state UCR program could designate up to two local agencies within the state to be audited -- in the same manner as the Statistical/Quantitative Review -- by FBI staff. • Special Reviews would be permitted on a case-by-case and available resource basis, and are audits done on an ad hoc basis off of the triennial cycle for "situations that require immediate FBI assistance." 6 A later quarterly program update noted that a Probability Sampling Method had been added to this review, by which "the CAU staff will evaluate the local agency records from a sample of local agencies" in cases where "a state program is unable to collect local agency records in support of the Statistical Review methodology," but the process was not clearly explained (Criminal Justice Information Services Division, 2016b:7–8)
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From page 173... ...
There is much work to be done in bringing procedures for handling missing data up to expected standard practices of a statistical agency -- and likewise for the development of edit checks and remediations that flag anomalies but that do not risk destruction of important partial data. Part of demonstrating national commitment to the collection of national crime statistics must be finding ways to continue to improve and expand systematic spot audits.
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From page 174... ...
• On a periodic basis, local agencies take stock of recurring problems, retraining data entry personnel as necessary and modifying software (or contacting vendor to modify software) to resolve issues.
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From page 175... ...
purpose and perceived benefit of nationally compiled crime statistics to many crime data users/stakeholders. In our panel's interactions with crime data users, local agencies noted the inherently contradictory nature of typical UCR data presentations: extensive tabular listings that practically beg the drawing of direct comparisons while simultaneously arguing against doing so.
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From page 176... ...
comprised of representatives of various law enforcement agencies and stakeholder groups. Accepting the premise that UCR Summary–type measures were no longer adequate to meet user or community needs, the CIWG discussions called for combining measures based on incident-based crime reporting with a variety of contextual variables to put crime numbers in community context.
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From page 177... ...
Accordingly, this section appeals for a change in approach in the presentation of modern, national crime statistics: Give data users the necessary tools to make crime rate comparisons in proper context rather than dismissively advise against doing that one thing -- drawing comparisons -- that is the primary use of nationally compiled data for most stakeholders. Specifically, we suggest that the dissemination platform for new, national crime statistics should also provide straightforward access to auxiliary data resources and tabulations that may permit meaningful comparisons between jurisdictions and across time.
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From page 178... ...
The law specifically directed that the database be "housed and maintained in the private sector," but that it "allow Federal, State, and local law enforcement officials as well as authorized retail companies (and authorized associated retail databases) " to populate 7 For example, Sparrow (2000)
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From page 179... ...
The law included more generic assertions that the Justice Department "make available funds to provide for the ongoing administrative and technological costs to federal law enforcement agencies participating in the database project" and that it "may make grants to help provide for the administrative and technological costs to [participating] State and local law enforcement agencies." 10 See http://www.verisk.com/archived/2013/verisk-retail-launches-lerpnet-falcon.html.
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From page 180... ...
– Corporate: corporate frauds We draw two principal messages from our discussions with stakeholders and deliberations and from the preceding information on measuring retail loss. The first is that, fundamentally, collecting data on crimes affecting businesses largely amounts to trying to achieve information sharing in a culture where information sharing is anathema.
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From page 181... ...
The second principal message is the related point that trade associations such as RILA might emerge as the source of data and key indicators for particular offenses, on the grounds that businesses might be more amenable to information sharing within an association than with law enforcement, survey researchers, and the like. Moreover, enterprises by trade support organizations such as the proposed classification system for total retail loss should be strongly encouraged, fostering principled stances to define and measure things related to crime.
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