The Effect of NIBRS Reporting on Item Missing Data in Murder Cases

Abstract

The Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) is undergoing a large-scale conversion from the traditional summary system and its Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). One goal in designing NIBRS was to improve the quality of crime data. Little is known about the actual effect of the substantial changes in data collection instituted by NIBRS. Gaining this understanding is important for homicide researchers, as more states and law enforcement agencies replace the SHR with NIBRS data collection. This article measures data quality in terms of itemmissing data and compares the amount of missing murder characteristics in NIBRS with the SHR. The findings obtained are inconsistent. Depending on the characteristic, missing data in NIBRS decreased, increased, or remained relatively unchanged. These results reveal that despite the changes in NIBRS, the UCR continues to struggle with capturing information known to police and collecting particular incident details such as victim-offender relationship and circumstance.