WEAKNESSES OF THE UCR

An obvious shortcoming of the UCR Crime Index is its emphasis upon conven-
tional street crimes and its exclusion of other serious crime. The UCR definition of
serious crime deflects attention from such illegal acts as corporate violence, political
crime, and computer fraud. People may be misled into believing that they are most
endangered by murderers or robbers, when in fact the personal and financial costs of
corporate and political crime far exceed those of conventional street crimes.
Among the figures they cite are: each year 10,000 lives are lost due to
unnecessary surgery and 20,000 persons are killed because of errors in prescribing
drugs. The authors point out that numerous birth defects were caused by the
premature marketing of Thalidomide by the Rich- ardson-Merrell Company in the
1960s. Chapters 11 and 12 examine more closely the issues of such forms of white-
collar crime. The health care debate in 2009 brought attention to the fact that
thousands of Americans die each year due to “errors” made by medical
professionals.
The UCR also can be a tool for political manipulation. Police administrators
sometimes rely upon these data to justify requests for additional money for person-
nel, equipment, and training. At other times, the Crime Index can be manipulated
by a department to indicate exemplary performance (i.e., reducing crime rates or
increasing clearance rates). This can be achieved by failing to record some crime
reports or by negotiating with offenders to plead guilty to a number of offenses,
some of which they may not have committed, in return for a reduced sentence. This
most frequently occurs with property offenses, which traditionally have low clear-
ance rates. The police can sometimes solve or “clear” as many as 200 burglaries
by bargaining with one suspect. These data become an in-house self-evaluation of
police performance.
 Several problems also arise from recording practices. While the Uniform Crime
Reporting Handbook specifies definitions and procedures to be followed, different
departments and regions of the country may still adhere to idiosyncratic standards.
While it may be accurate to state that “a rose is a rose is a rose,” it is not
necessar- ily the case that a rape is a rape is a rape. See, for example, the analysis
by Duncan Chappell and his colleagues (1971) of how Boston police reports of rape
differ in both vocabulary and style (and particularly in terms of the kinds of acts
that are defined as rape) from the reports of Los Angeles police. Cultural
standards, level of police professionalism, and staffing patterns can lead to the same
behavior being recorded differently in different jurisdictions. Take the case of a 19-
year-old female college student who claims that she was raped, beaten, and robbed
while hitchhiking home from a fraternity party. Does the officer record this as a rape,
a robbery, or an assault? The answer is, it all depends. A chauvinist officer might
believe that a woman hitch- hiking alone at night is “asking for it,” and therefore,
the officer might ignore the rape allegation. A different officer may record the
event as a rape. (See Chapter 11 for more discussion of rape.) UCR instructions
mandate that the crime be tabulated in the most serious category, known as the
Hierarchical Rule. If the student was robbed and raped, the crimes would appear only
as a rape (and not as a robbery), but if she were killed, the crimes would be
classified as a homicide (and not as a rape).
Another problem concerns the manner in which crimes are counted. Instructions
direct law enforcement agencies to tally each distinct property crime as one offense.
If, for example, 10 rooms in a hotel were burglarized, these offenses should be
recorded as one burglary, but if 10 apartments in an apartment complex were
burglarized, the crimes should be recorded as 10 burglaries. For personal offenses,
such as robber- ies, the number of victims is immaterial for tabulating purposes, as is
the number of offenders. If two robbers confront five patrons in a bank, only one
robbery is said to have occurred. These definitional rules tend to underestimate the
extent of certain offense types and clearly make direct comparison with victimization
and self-report surveys inappropriate. For instance, while the UCR procedures would
classify the above bank robbery as one offense, victimization surveys would identify
five victims while a self report survey would produce two offenders.
Crime rates also can be misleading. Take, for instance, the city of Las Vegas, or
any other resort community. These places are inundated by visitors, some of whom
inevitably commit crimes. Yet, the crime rate is calculated in terms only of the
number of people in the resident population, not in terms of the true total of people
that might become either offenders or victims. And because rates are calculated in
terms of a jurisdiction’s population, serious errors in determining the number of
people living in an area—not an uncommon problem—can affect the accuracy of
crime rates.
Whereas the traditional UCR system required tallying the number of occurrences
of Part I offenses as well as arrest data for Part I and Part II offenses, NIBRS requires
more detailed reports and allows for recording of multiple offenses, thus eliminating
the Hierarchical Rule which led to recording of only the most serious offense. Agencies
using NIBRS collect data regarding individual crime incidents and arrests and submit
them in “reports” detailing each incident. This procedure provides much more
thorough informa- tion about crimes than did the summary statistics of the traditional
UCR system.
NIBRS has abandoned the use of Part I and Part II offenses in favor of Group A
and Group B classifications. Part I offenses focused on “street offenses” and ignored
“suite offenses.” Group A is considerably more inclusive of a wide array of criminal
activity. Detailed information recorded for each of the 22 Group A offenses include
crime circumstances, victim and offender information, arrestee data, and information
about the extent of damage to both person and property.

The following offenses are included in Group A:

1. Arson
2. Assault
3. Bribery
4. Burglary
5. Counterfeiting
6. Vandalism
7. Drug Offenses
8. Embezzlement
9. Extortion
10. Fraud
11. Gambling Offenses
12. Homicide
13. Kidnapping
14. Larceny/Theft
15. Auto Theft
16. Pornography
17. Prostitution
18. Robbery
19. Sex Crimes, Force
20. Sex Offenses
21. Stolen Property
22. Weapon Violation

Offenses included in Group B consist of the following:

1. Bad Checks
2. Curfew/Vagrancy
3. Disorderly Conduct
4. DUI
5. Drunkenness
6. Family Offense
7. Liquor Violations
8. Peeping Tom
9. Runaway
10. Trespass
11. All Other
 South Carolina was the first state to “pilot” this new program and by 1988,
NIBRS was approved for general use (U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, 2006). In
2004, 5,741 agencies (representing 20 percent of the U.S. population and 16 percent
of crime statistics collected by the UCR) were represented, and as of 2006, 26 states
were NIBRS “certified,” 12 were in various stages of testing, and an additional 8 were
in various stages of planning and development (FBI, 2006). While the NIBRS data
are not a nationally-representative sample of law enforcement agencies or criminal
incidents, they are one of the few multi-jurisdictional data sources available for
examining offenders, victims, situational characteristics, and police arrest/clearance
status in crime incidents.

Strengths of NIBRS
NIBRS provides a number of improvements over existing measures such as the
UCR, NCVS, and self-reports. A thorough critique by Maxfield (1999:145) sug-
gests the following benefits of NIBRS over existing alternatives: (1) incident- and
victim-level analysis can be disaggregated to local jurisdictions and aggregated to
intermediate levels of analysis; (2) incident details supporting analysis of ancil-
lary offenses (drugs, weapons) and crime situations are available;(3) separable
individual, household, commercial, and business victimizations are included;
(4) data on incidents targeting victims under age 12 are available; (5) a broader
range of offense categories, including those affecting abstract victims, are avail-
able; (6) allowance for examination of non-household-based individual victims
and other incidents that are difficult to measure with household-based surveys;
(7) individual-level information about offenders from arrest records and victim
reports are available; and, (8) information about the residual status of victims and
offenders is included. These advances have a number of practical implications for
communities and law enforcement agencies. Faggiani and McLaughlin (1999), for
example, demonstrate how local law enforcement agencies can engage in “tactical
crime analysis” using NIBRS data by examining local crime patterns and then using
this information to strategically target crimes and areas. They also have important
implications for researchers who seek to better understand the nature and scope of
criminal incidents.

Weaknesses of NIBRS
Maxfield (1999:145-146) also summarizes a number of limitations of NIBRS
relative to existing sources of crime data. First, like the UCR, NIBRS data
include only crimes reported to police and retained by police recordkeeping
systems, thus
excluding unreported and unrecorded crimes. Secondly, the inflexibility of the
NIBRS specifications creates a considerable reporting burden on participating local
agencies. This may explain why NIBRS has been adopted primarily by smaller agen-
cies in smaller states, with the nation’s largest cities and agencies lagging behind.
Third, different types of agencies have different organizational incentives. The FBI
and other national agencies are most interested in a national monitoring system and
national-level research application, while local and state submitting agencies are more
concerned with local recordkeeping requirements, analysis to support local
operations, and conservation of resources for data systems that have local
applications. Fourth, the age and complexity of the NIBRS record structure and
concomitant size of data files present unfamiliar challenges to researchers, analysts,
and computer hardware and software. For example, Dunn & Zelenock’s (1999)
analyses of 1996 NIBRS data illustrate difficulties associated with analyzing millions
of records and the need for powerful computer hardware and software to process the
information. Fifth, a num- ber of uncertainties exist concerning the error structure of
incident-based measures generally and NIBRS data specifically. Recent
examinations have identified some of these limitations and offered methods of
correction. For example, Snyder (1999) found that juveniles account for a
disproportionate amount of robbery clearances in NIBRS relative to other data
sources. Addington’s recent work has identified limita- tions in the NIBRS data
concerning murder incidents (Addington, 2004) particularly as they pertain to
police clearance rates (Addington, 2006).

Recent Studies Using NIBRS

Despite these limitations, NIBRS provides a promising approach to the study of
crime for both researchers and practitioners. Recent examinations by Chilton and Jar-
vis (1999b) and Rantalla and Edwards (2000) of NIBRS data relative to other sources
of crime data have generally found that NIBRS present a suitable complement to
more commonly utilized sources such as the NCVS and UCR. Additionally, Akiyama
and Nolan (1999) and Dunn and Zelenock (1999) present clear descriptions for
users of the data and highlight the remarkable versatility of incident-based measures.
This versatility is illustrated as NIBRS data have been used to examine a variety of
top- ics ranging from descriptions of criminal incidents to characteristics of offenders
as they pertain to official agency processing (e.g., Addington, 2006; Taylor,
Holleran, & Topalli, 2009) to tests of criminological theories. Recent studies have
used NIBRS to examine a wide range of crimes, ranging from child abuse (Finkelhor
& Ormrod, 2001) and hate crimes (Messner, McHugh & Felson, 2004; Strom, 2001)
to intimate partner violence (Thompson, Saltzman & Bibel, 1999; Vasquez, Stohr &
Purkiss, 2005) and differences between lethal and nonlethal assaults (Chilton,
2004).
Some concern has been expressed regarding the possible effect on crime rates of
this new recording system. Ramona Rantala and Thomas Edwards (2000) conducted
an examination of this very issue. They compared crime rates in more than 1,000
agencies that have adopted the NIBRS system and found that while the crime rates
under NIBRS were greater, the difference was relatively small. They found that on
average the violent crime rate was less than one percent higher and the property
crime rate slightly more than two percent higher under NIBRS guidelines compared
to the traditional UCR system.