Modernizing Crime Statistics: Report 2 New Systems for Measuring Crime (2018) / Chapter Skim
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3 Coordination and Governance of Modern National Crime Statistics
3 Coordination and Governance of Modern National Crime Statistics
Pages 49-72
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From page 49... ...
An obvious further example is that federal law enforcement agencies are mandated by law to report UCR-defined crimes to the UCR Program. This mandate became law in 1988, yet it was not until 2015 -- following a year-long concerted effort to get a very small set of those federal agencies (including units of the FBI itself)
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From page 50... ...
The FBI also publishes tabular summaries of the data -- historically, as depicted in Section B.4, with strong disclaimers characterizing the national collection as little more than collation, though the FBI has shown more engagement in recent decades. Meanwhile, BJS supports the UCR program through its grantmaking authority and its sponsored methodological studies; it analyzes the data (along with that from BJS's own National Crime Victimization Survey [NCVS]
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From page 51... ...
Deference to the voluntary nature of data contributions means that the federal level cannot directly impose systems or requirements on local law enforcement agencies. Historically, this has suppressed the notion that use of systems or implementation of requirements might be motivated or incentivized, positively or negatively.
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From page 52... ...
In short, because no single entity owns or assumes direct responsibility for the nation's crime statistics as a whole, there is neither a strong coordinating body nor a defined governance structure dedicated to the generation of data on all types of crime. In our assessment, real improvement in national crime statistics hinges critically on the creation and maintenance of both these functions.
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From page 53... ...
Accordingly, we conclude that this strong national coordination in national crime statistics is essential: Conclusion 3.1: A stronger federal coordination role is needed in the production of the nation's crime statistics: providing resources for information systems development, working with software providers to implement standards, and shifting some burden of data standardization from respondents to the state and federal levels. The goal of this stronger role is to make crime data collection a product of routine operations.
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From page 54... ...
• Credibility among data users may be the area in which national crime statistics have, historically, fallen shortest, with the overly broad branding
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From page 55... ...
Decades of high and genuinely impressive levels of local-agency voluntary contribution of UCR Summary data is undoubtedly a partial function of crime reporting, but it could not endure without grounding in trust relationships between local agencies, the state UCR coordination network, and the national UCR program. Likewise, BJS's impressive record of methodological innovation in the NCVS is anchored in gaining trust and rapport with survey respondents -- to most effectively yet respectfully motivate them to share details about often painful and possibly traumatic experiences.
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From page 56... ...
. Neither of the major agencies that currently collect national crime data, BJS and the FBI, has all of the necessary requirements to fulfill the coordination and governance roles that we envision, though both have some relevant attributes.
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From page 57... ...
(f) operate a central clearinghouse for police statistics under the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, and a computerized nationwide index of law enforcement information under the National Crime Information Center [and]
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From page 58... ...
confer and cooperate with Federal statistical agencies as needed to carry out the purposes of this subchapter, including by entering into cooperative data sharing agreements in conformity with all laws and regulations applicable to the disclosure and use of data.
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From page 59... ...
In both cases, addressing the crime categories that have long been neglected in national crime statistics will require serious attention to topic domains that may not mesh neatly with the traditional highest priorities of either agency -- and there are grounds for concern about the capability of either BJS or the FBI to effectively tap the data resources of external agencies. BJS can legally enter into data collection agreements with all manner of governmental and private agencies.
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From page 60... ...
We recognize the legal and regulatory mandates, and general justification, for national crime data collection, and we appreciate the breadth of terrain that must be traversed to begin to come close to a complete picture of crime in the United States. However, we concluded that there is no solid basis for suggesting that any particular "organizational chart" arrangement or designation of duties is superior to any other; we are aware of no relevant research literature or other scientific footing that we could point to in making such a ruling.
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From page 61... ...
3.2 RECASTING CRIME DATA COLLECTION AS A FEDERAL-STATE COOPERATIVE PROGRAM We began this chapter with reference to the federated nature of law enforcement in the United States -- the reservation of much police and law enforcement functions to the states and thence to local governments. Accordingly, given the vital role of the states in American law enforcement, another important observation about the coordination of national crime statistics is in order: It is difficult to imagine major change in U.S.
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From page 62... ...
Collectively, this network of state agencies has a support arm/service organization of its own, in the Association of State Uniform Crime Reporting Programs (ASUCRP)
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From page 63... ...
Above all, reference to the language of state laws makes abundantly clear that partnership with the states is not simply desirable -- if only to reduce the number of data input streams from almost 20,000 individual law enforcement agencies to roughly 50 -- but virtually essential. Throughout this report, we have tried to take care to characterize the voluntary nature of local agency crime reporting as effectively being voluntary to the national program.
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From page 64... ...
In Section D.2, we will discuss in greater detail the notion of data quality as the primary "value added" to local law enforcement stakeholders (and data users) -- as the thing that makes it beneficial to local agencies' routine operations and thus motivates cooperation with the national crime statistics program.
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From page 65... ...
law, for those offenses for which officers have arrest power and departments have booking power. Difficult as the task of finding and referencing passages of state law related to crime reporting is, it pales in comparison to the task of building crosswalk files between offense codes based on state law and different coding systems (e.g., NIBRS codes or our classification's codes, plus associate attributes)
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From page 66... ...
In doing so, we reiterate that we know of no example federal-state cooperative that is a direct, obvious, interchangeable match to the problems of crime data collection -- nor do we know of any federal-state arrangement that has uniquely solved all the myriad problems associated with data transfers -- but merely that they may provide useful perspectives for framing implementation and methodological work. A major example of a federal-state cooperative data collection program that might be a useful model to consider is the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
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From page 67... ...
A second, longstanding federal-state cooperative program is one that is arguably closest in content to some crime data: the nation's core collection of vital statistics. The National Vital Statistics System is the oldest and most successful example of intergovernmental data sharing in public health and is a potentially instructive example to consider because it faces some of the same structural problems as faced in crime statistics.
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From page 68... ...
3.3 DATA REPORTING AND DISSEMINATION Managing and enhancing the outflow of data and data products is an important part of the ideal, beginning-to-end coordination and governance roles we envision for national crime statistics. Issues related to publishing annual reports and other tabulations are crucial to the credibility of the data collection enterprise as a whole; this is an area, after all, in which the annual publication of a volume entitled Crime in the United States has constrained the scope of what is commonly viewed as crime and given an undue impression of quality and completeness.
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From page 69... ...
As the range and content of national crime statistics grow, from an NCS-X– supplemented national NIBRS file to the fuller, multisource collection enabled by and based upon a new classification of crime, there will inevitably be a learning curve. Challenges will be encountered and iterative improvements 4 An admitted wild card in consideration of annual reporting is that a comprehensive annual report should, necessarily, combine insights from police-report, survey, and administrativetype/external sources in tandem -- yet the UCR-based Crime in the United States and the NCVSbased Criminal Victimization have traditionally had staggered release dates.
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From page 70... ...
3.4 REMAINING IMPLEMENTATION AND METHODOLOGY ISSUES Appendix D includes longer-form discussions of some additional important topics related to methodology and implementation, mentioned in brief in the main text but fuller consideration of which might otherwise disrupt the narrative flow. These include: • Examining the commonly cited barriers that impeded adoption of NIBRS for 3 decades, accompanied by discussion of what has changed now to make success more likely; • Arguing that improved data quality should be the major goal of voluntary contribution of data to national crime statistics; • Observing that -- rather than warn against overly simplistic comparisons of crime rates across jurisdictions and time -- the dissemination platform for modern crime statistics should also provide easy access to the kind of contextual and community data that enables effective comparison; and • Describing the challenges of getting a better reading on crime involving businesses and organizations as actors.
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From page 71... ...
Attribute-driven and incident-based reporting using the classification proposed by our panel means upending concepts that have been at the heart of crime data collection for decades -- not least of which are a shift away from defining crime by the strict language of state penal code violations and the treatment of some offenses that carry administrative/regulatory sanctions in the same manner as those punishable by corrections. It also challenges crime data providers, collectors, aggregators, processors, and users alike to embrace some markedly different approaches -- the most fundamental, and simple, being the parsing of multiple offense codes for simple incidents, relative to the cognitive oversimplification of the traditional UCR Summary that collapses each incident to a single offense.
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