Urgent action is needed to improve national data on crime, says a working group convened by the think tank Council on Criminal Justice.
The panel offered recommendations to strengthen the crime data infrastructure in ways that would "better equip policymakers with timely, accurate, and usable data essential to effectively address community violence and other crime."
Unlike available data on important subjects including inflation and unemployment trends, national crime data lag by many months.
The delay hinders government and community leaders as they try to spot emerging crime issues and deploy interventions, a problem that the working group says has become more serious as the internet, social media, and other technologies have helped spread new types of crime.
The lack of real-time national data, said the experts, "can distort public perceptions of trends and prompt changes to strategies and policies based on anecdote rather than evidence."
"National crime data still fall short of what we need to sufficiently inform policy, practice, and political dialogue," the report says.
The fallout of inaccuracies in reporting on whether some crime types are rising or falling "can be huge—in terms of crime tactics and strategies, whether the police chief stays on the job or gets fired, even whether
the mayor or prosecutor is re-elected or driven from office," said the group.
" At stake are billions in government spending on public safety and criminal justice, the viability of businesses and urban centers, and the extent to which Americans are safe, and feel safe, in their homes and communities.”
Among the group's key recommendations:
• The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), working with the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and other federal agencies, should publish a comprehensive annual compendium of crime in the U.S.,
starting next year that simultaneously reports law enforcement and victimization survey
data and includes cybercrime, hate crime, securities fraud, and other important crime types.
• BJS should publish monthly crime statistics from a nationally representative sample of cities, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases employment statistics on the first Friday of the month.
• The FBI should increase the number of law enforcement agencies reporting to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to cover 90% of the U.S. population by the end of 2025 and 98% by the end of 2027.
• The CDC should improve systems that collect information on violent deaths and firearms assaults and injuries by directing the National Center for Health Statistics to develop a plan to address the systematic miscoding of firearms assaults and injuries in hospital discharge coding.
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• Congress should fund a National Justice Data Analysis Center that would define national best practices for law enforcement agencies to visualize and share data, provide training and technical assistance to help agencies deploy data to improve crime analysis and prevention, and enhance crime trends data science.
The working group recommended that Congress increase BJS appropriations from the current $35 million to $75 million for FY2025, scaling up to $93 million in FY2026.
The group is headed by John Roman of the Center on Public Safety and Justice at NORC at the University of Chicago and was co-founded by the late criminologist Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Advising the panel was criminologist Alex Piquero of the University of Miami, former director of the U.S., Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Other members are Ruth Abaya of the Health Alliance for Violence Prevention, Thomas Abt of the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland, Delrice Adams of the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, Jeff Asher of AH Datalytics, Deborah Azrael of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, Jamein Cunningham of the University of Texas Austin, School of Law, Drew Evans of the Minnesota Dept. of Public Safety, Dallas Police Chief Edgardo Garcia, Brandon Gibson, Chief Operating Officer, State of Tennessee, criminologist Janet Lauritsen of the University of Missouri-St. Louis,'Toole of former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, Kathleen O'Toole of 21CP Solutions, Fernando Rejon of the Urban Peace Institute, Lisa Shoaf of the Ohio Statistical Analysis Center and Keon Turner of the Virginia Department of State Policing.