The FBI hasn’t seen a lot of crime in the past four years: State-of-the-art analysis of 2021 crime trends in the U.S.
The FBI annualized collection of data from law enforcement agencies saw 7,262 crimes motivated by race, religion, gender or other factors last year. That’s a decrease from 8,263 incidents in 2020. But those numbers offer misleading conclusions as they are drawn from a pool of 3,255 fewer law enforcement agencies.
The Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), a nonprofit that studies criminal justice policy, published a study in January analyzing 2021 crime trends across 27 major cities in the US. Their analysis of the FBI’s data found that homicides rose by 5% between 2020 and 2021, and that the steep increases in violent crime were leveling off.
But thousands of law enforcement agencies, including some of the biggest in the country like New York and Los Angeles, have lagged in the transition that began in 2016 to the new National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
It is not certain how useful this latest release is, given the record-low participation by local agencies just a few weeks before the upcoming elections.
The FBI was estimating an initial participation rate of 75% when the transition was announced.
The lack of comprehensive data — and monthslong delay between the end of the year and when the report is published — has led other organizations to fill in the gaps.
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“I can think of no other system in American culture today where we accept this archaic data collection system,” said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics. Private citizens are being made to guess at what the national murder trend is.
Scores of police departments have found it difficult and costly to upgrade their legacy systems, despite the Justice Department aiding state and local agencies with more than $120 million in grants. The San Francisco Police Department does not plan to send FBI data for another 10 years.
Technical challenges, low incentives to adapt to the new system are just some of the factors that contribute to low participation rates.
“There hasn’t been a lot of political pressure,” Asher said, citing the voluntary nature of the reporting as another one of the challenges. It is hard to overcome the system that has been around for 80 years or so as you have to train your officers in new ways.
In a news release, the Justice Department said “data cannot reliably be compared across years” as “several of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies, as well as some states, did not make the transition.” As more law enforcement agencies transition to the new system, the department said, it would be able to “provide a richer and more complete picture of hate crimes nationwide.”
“For a hate crime to be reported, there needs to be some evidence of bias that’s a small part in the crime,” Kaplan says. “And then the police need to have actual evidence, not just like, ‘I think I was the victim of a hate crime.’ They need proof that bias was motivating.
For example, in 2021 New Jersey reported 877 anti-Black bias incidents while the FBI counted 92. The FBI said there were 25 cases of anti-Jewish crimes in the same year.
New Jersey has reported a 400% increase in bias incidents since 2015, largely owing to the increase in harassment, a category the FBI does not include.
In some cases, gathering evidence to prove the motivating bias behind a crime may require more investigative resources than investigating the crime itself.