Did many cities across the US actually stop reporting crime stats to the federal government?

[Anonymous]

I've seen claims that crime rates have gone down in recent years, but also claims that the federal government changed the reporting system and many cities across the US, double digit percentages, aren't reporting their crime stats just yet. Does anyone know the situation?

[Syntosi]

That is not entirely how I understand it. What is basically happening is that the FBI gets sent local criminal data as a form of cooperation, meaning its not actually required. The local police obviously dont have anything to object to so the FBI used to get basically data from every local law enforcement.

This however changed in 2021 when the FBI discontinued support for an older system in favor of a new modern system, meaning that everyone who reported their statistics using the old system now could not until they themselves upgraded to the newer system.

In other words, the problem is just the slow adoption of the new system. They are working on it but at the rate its going we should expect a few more years until everyone has made the switch. Slow bureaucracy and all that.

[Syntosi]

As for crime going down, that has been true since the beginning of modern society. As a rule of thumb, crime is always going down unless something extreme happens such as covid19 which had a temporary spike in crime.

[Asker]

This is a really useful reply. Thank you. Do you know if the lack of reporting from the agencies that haven't adopted the update, is causing reduced crime stats? For federal statistics reporting?

[Syntosi]

I dont know but probably not. The areas I associate with having more problems modernizing would be rural areas and that is not really where most crime happens. Mostly since they dont have many people and there is much less money involved to motivate crime.

[Syntosi]

Thinking about it the crime statistics might look especially good recently after coming down from the unusually high bump after covid19. Everything is relative you know.

[Asker]

Yesh, the second part makes a ton of sense. For the rural vs urban thing, I just googled it, and found this: www.themarshallproject.org/.../fbi-crime-rates-data-gap-nibrs

I don't know how accurate it is, but it's showing mostly the opposite trend. Like LAPD and NYPD aren't reporting. A bulk of the non-reporting seems to be in the more urban areas.

But that makes me wonder if those big cities are still using the old method, and the old methods data is still being aggregated into the federal crime stats?

[Syntosi]

The data would still be there, just not sent to the FBI until they modernize or alternatively if they did it manually for whatever reason. I can't decide if its surprising or not to have some urban areas refusing to modernize. After all, we have had a lot of drama regarding them being highly dysfunctional and needing more general reforms.

Unless someone was extremely incompetent all the data would be retroactively updated once they finally modernize their system. We are not talking about an actual loss of information here, only issues with the cooperation between law enforcement and the FBI.

[Asker]

Okay, that makes sense and I've actually seen similar things with local to federal reporting. Not by years, but by months. In the end, all the data will be there. But it does explain some of the steep "downtrends" in crime then. Once all the data is on, those trends will probably look a bit more realistic.

Thanks for the info, my friend.

[Syntosi]

Happy to be of help

[NaultD]

Wasn't the rise in the crime rates in the 80 and 90s from having lead in gasoline. so 1996 it's been bleeding out of people system. Even lead paint in more poverty areas was causing higher crime rates.

[jennifer_bloom]

News channels serve two agendas - the politician pay agenda and the government control agenda. So if reporting a crime is bad for social organization, it won't be discussed in any widespread way because media businesses are a servant of the government that pays them.

[jahaims]

They stopped responding to most calls