Latest FBI Crime Report Missing Most of Its Usual Data Tables

The FBI's latest Crime in the United States report is missing more than
70 percent of its usual data tables. Photo: Kristi Blokhin / Shutterstock.com

Much to the alarm of human rights activists and others who are concerned about having a deep understanding of crime in the United States, the most recent version of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program’s (UCR) Crime In the United States report is missing 70 percent of the data tables seen in previous reports.

The Crime in the United States report is a collection of crime statistics gathered from more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies in cities across the U.S. But the 2016 Crime in the United States report, the first issued under the Trump administration, has so many fewer data tables that it could have a serious negative attempt on analysts’ attempts to understand crime trends in the country.

The UCR’s report also serves as an important resource for journalists and researchers who track national crime trends.

The data missing from the 2016 report (the most recent) includes information on arrests, the circumstances of homicides. For example, data about the relationship between victims and perpetrators, victims’ and offenders’ age, sex, race, or ethnicity; or what weapons were used in committing crimes. In practical terms, that means researchers can no longer identify the number of kids under 18 killed by firearms in any given year, and data tables used to identify the number of women murdered by their partners is also no longer available.

According to Human Rights Watch, the missing data allows the public to understand whether the arrests police make differ between urban, suburban, and rural forces or between people of different ages or genders. “This data is necessary for understanding how policing practices may infringe upon human rights and for holding police departments accountable,” the organization said in its release. “The data the FBI has decided not to release to public scrutiny also allowed the public to understand whether trends in violent crime and homicide rates match the rhetoric of administration leaders.”

The FBI said that the decision to remove the data was due to low web traffic. It also said that the APB wasn’t involved in the decision to remove data tables from the 2016 report, but the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs certainly was.

The decision met with criticism from many quarters.

“[Low web traffic] is an indefensible reason to stop publishing such important data…[The data’s] removal points toward policies more aligned with information suppression than with public transparency,” Human Rights Watch said.

James Nolan, who worked at the UCR for five years, said that removing the tables for lack of web traffic was “somewhat illogical” and that “it’s shocking that they made these decisions to publish that many fewer tables and they didn’t make the decision with the APB.”

“How much time and savings is there in moving an online table?” Nolan asked. “These are canned programs: You create table 71 and table 71 is connected to a link in a blink of an eye.”

The removal of very important data from the Crime in the United States report is troubling. As society gets more complex, our information needs also become more complex. With that in mind, our government needs more transparency, not less.