On paper, the new National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is clearly superior to the Uniform Crime Report Summary Reporting System, which it replaces. NIBRS enables agencies to collect data on multiple offenses within the same incident (such as a robbery that leads to a murder), provides greater insight into a wider array of a jurisdiction’s crimes compared with the old system, and allows for novel breakdowns of crime victimization by age, sex, and race. In the long run, NIBRS will provide “much more detail and context around crimes,” per the FBI, than the legacy system did, including the possibility of tracking nonfatal-shooting victims for the first time.

But there are major issues. To begin with, of the nation’s nearly 19,000 law-enforcement agencies, more than 7,000 are not yet reporting data to NIBRS. Though they have had years to prepare for this switch—the FBI announced the change in 2015 and gave out more than $120 million to help agencies make the transition—only 62 percent, covering just 65 percent of the U.S. population, are reporting to NIBRS for 2021, according to the FBI.

NIBRS is voluntary at the federal level, so the FBI cannot compel reporting. All agencies had to either switch to NIBRS from the legacy system or report no crime data to the FBI. Marcus Berzofsky, a senior research statistician at RTI International who is working on the estimation problem of the NIBRS transition, anticipates that 32 of the 72 largest agencies will not report a full year’s worth of NIBRS data for 2021. Eight agencies covering 1 million or more people each will not report NIBRS data, including both the NYPD and LAPD.