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Overview

The importance of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) cannot be emphasized enough as they are the only two ongoing national measures of crime in the United States that provide annual level and change estimates. While discussions of the UCR and NCVS often focus on the differences between the two, the two systems share many similarities in their development over time as well as their influence on how crime has been defined and studied. This research paper examines the origins and development of these two data collection systems individually and describes the similarities between them. This research paper concludes by examining how the UCR and NCVS have contributed to criminology by shaping views on what crimes “count,” especially the focus on serious, violent street crimes. Alternative ways crime could be measured in the UCR and NCVS’s existing frameworks are discussed.

Introduction

The Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) are the only two ongoing national measures of crime in the United States that provide annual level and change estimates. Data collected under the UCR use official records to measure crimes known to police. The NCVS data rely on survey responses to generate estimates of criminal victimization. This research paper examines the origins and development of the UCR and NCVS individually and describes the similarities between the two data collection systems. This research paper concludes by discussing how both systems have contributed to criminology by shaping what crime “counts,” particularly the focus on violent, street crime. Finally, alternative ways are considered with regard to defining and measuring crime that could be used in the UCR and NCVS’s existing frameworks.

Origins And Development Of The UCR And NCS-NCVS

Uniform Crime Reporting Program

Before the UCR, very little information was available to study crime, and the existing data were primarily of prisoners collected by the Bureau of the Census. Information on individuals living in correctional facilities was included in the 1850 decennial Census (Rosen 1995). Before this national effort, a handful of states collected crime statistics using court and prison data. The first national collection of crime data using police records occurred in 1880 when the Census Bureau included homicides, arsons, and burglaries known to police as part of the 1880 decennial (Rosen 1995). Given the local level of data collection, a significant problem concerned the lack of uniformity in crime definitions across states. While this issue was acknowledged, it was not resolved with the early Census data collection efforts and these data were largely discounted (Rosen 1995).

By the 1920s, the need for national crime data had become apparent. Countries including France, Austria-Hungary, Sweden, Holland, Denmark, and Turkey were generating national crime statistics at this time (IACP 1929). Many criminologists and statisticians voiced their embarrassment that the United States lacked information on this important social indicator. In 1927, the National Crime Commission pronounced that “the United States had the worst criminal statistics of any civilized country” (as quoted by Rosen 1995, p. 220). Organizations such as the Social Science Research Council also supported the collection of crime data as a way “to provide a solid empirical base for ‘scientific criminology.’” (Rosen 1995, p. 223). Police officials also demanded national statistics on the nature and extent of crime to “allay the public’s undue fears” over media-created “crime waves” (Maltz 1977, p. 33).

While the need for national crime data was clear, the most appropriate way to generate these statistics in the United States was less so. Debates ensued over the appropriate data source to be used (see Rosen 1995, for a discussion). Initially interest focused on court records as police records were deemed to be unreliable (Maltz 1977). Ultimately the decision was made to utilize data closest to the criminal event, which supported the use of police records rather than court or correctional data (Rosen 1995; Maltz 1977). Along with the data source to be used, debates centered on who should collect and disseminate the data. The main two contenders were the Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner to the Federal Bureau of Investigation or FBI) and the Bureau of the Census (Maltz 1977). With the decision to collect police data, many favored the Census Bureau since it was a neutral organization (Maltz 1977). Law enforcement organization such as the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) endorsed collection by the FBI (Maltz 1977). Eventually the FBI was selected due in part to lobbying by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Maltz 1977).

While some scholars have questioned the emphasis on the IACP with regard to the original idea for the UCR (Rosen 1995), the IACP and its Committee on Uniform Crime Records undertook the immediate work for designing this data collection system. After the decision to use police data had been made, many technical issues remained including “the structure of the data base, the source of the data, crime measures to be used, geographical uniformity of crime definitions, rules for scoring and counting offenses, [and] the mode of data collection” (Akiyama and Rosenthal 1990, p. 50). The work to address these issues culminated in the first UCR manual in 1929. This 464-page volume devoted more than half of its text to addressing the issues of which crimes would be reported to the UCR and uniformity in crime definition and counting procedures (IACP 1929). The remainder of the volume described other aspects of the UCR program, many of which are practices that still remain today (Akiyama and Rosenthal 1990). The handbook also explained the data submission procedure. Law enforcement agencies provided handwritten tallies of aggregate counts of crime, which was consistent with technological capabilities of the time. To promote participation in the voluntary UCR system, the FBI provided the necessary forms for free as well as and return, postage-paid envelopes (IACP 1929).

Initially the UCR collected seven crimes known to police, known as Index offenses. These crimes were murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Later in 1982, arson would be added as the eighth Index offense by congressional mandate (FBI 2004). The basic criteria used to select these crimes were the seriousness of the crime, the similarity of rates of occurrence throughout all geographic regions of the country, the frequency of occurrence, and the likelihood of coming to the attention of police (Poggio et al. 1985). Other crimes had been considered for collection such as carrying concealed weapons, arson, and kidnapping. The IACP explained that such crimes were excluded because “[e]ither they are concealed when committed so that the police frequently do not know they occur, or else their statutory definitions vary to such a degree it would be impossible to obtain reasonably comparable results. Unless the returns are limited to those offenses which can be relied upon to give a trustworthy picture of crime, their purpose will be defeated at the start.” (IACP 1929, p. 180). The IACP did emphasize that simply because a crime was not included in the UCR, it did not prevent a local law enforcement agency from collecting data for its own records.

In 1930, the FBI began collecting UCR data based on the program outlined by the IACP. That year, 400 law enforcement agencies provided data (FBI 2004). Since that time, many changes occurred (see Barnett-Ryan 2007, for a complete accounting), but the essence of the UCR Program remained basically the same for decades including the submission of handwritten aggregate tallies (Poggio et al. 1985, p. 21). In the late 1970s, pressure mounted for the FBI to modernize the UCR in order to capitalize on both the innovations in the capability of law enforcement agencies to collect more detailed crime data as well as the improvements in the scholarly study and understanding of criminality (FBI, n.d.; Poggio et al. 1985, p. 21).

In response to these calls for an update, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the FBI commissioned a team of experts to reevaluate the UCR (Poggio et al. 1985). The recommended plan that came out of this review was not fully implemented. Its call for more detailed crime information at the incident level, though, did provide the foundation for what would become the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) form of data collection for the UCR. South Carolina participated in the FBI’s pilot incident-level reporting program and in 1991 became the first state to submit its UCR data in NIBRS format (Barnett-Ryan 2007). By 1992, North Dakota, Iowa, and Idaho also were submitting their crime data in NIBRS format.

The NIBRS format covers a wider variety of offenses than captured by the summary report system’s Index, or as they are referred to today Part I, offenses. As the FBI has moved away from a “Crime Index” toward violent and property categories, the term “Index offenses” is no longer used in favor of “Part I” offenses (FBI, n.d.). NIBRS collects incident-level details for 46 Group A offenses, which include the 8 former Index offenses. Examples of these additional crimes range from kidnapping and forcible sex offenses beyond rape (such as sodomy and sexual assault with an object) to vandalism, gambling offenses, and fraud offenses. In addition to expanding the number of crimes reported to the UCR, NIBRS captures incident-level characteristics not included in the summary reporting system. For Group A offenses, NIBRS can collect up to 53 distinct data elements to describe each criminal incident. These details include demographic information for victims, offenders, and arrestees; victim-offender relationship; information about weapons, injuries, stolen items; and clearance of the incident. NIBRS also includes information on up to 10 offenses that occur in a criminal incident rather than reporting on only the most serious offense as was previously the case under the summary system.

One of the biggest limitations with NIBRS has been the transition from summary-based to incident-based data collection. As with the summary reporting system, participation in the UCR remains voluntary under NIBRS and is not mandated by the FBI. Unlike the summary reporting system, law enforcement agencies must be certified before they are eligible to submit data in NIBRS format. In addition, states and agencies are under no deadline to convert to NIBRS. As a result of these factors, the conversion process has been gradual. As of 2012, 32 states are NIBRS certified and NIBRS agencies cover 27 % of the US population (JRSA, n.d.).

National Crime Survey-National Crime Victimization Survey

Just as the UCR played an essential role in shaping the national collection of US crime statistics, the NCVS and its predecessor the National Crime Survey (NCS) had a similar groundbreaking role. Before the NCS, no national crime statistics had been based on survey data. The idea for using victim surveys to measure crime originated out of a convergence of factors that included increased attention on crime as a social problem, decreased confidence in the reliability of UCR data, and overall advances in the field of survey methodology (see Cantor and Lynch 2000 for a discussion). In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed two Presidential Commissions with charges that included “reduc[ing] the amount of crime that eluded the attention of police.” (Cantor and Lynch 2000, p. 98). To accomplish these goals, the Commissions realized the need for more data to better understand and explain what appeared to be a growing crime problem (President’s Commission 1967). The quality of US crime data at the time was strongly criticized by the Commission, which noted “the United States is today, in the era of the high speed computer, trying to keep track of crime and criminals with a system that was no less than adequate in the days of the horse and buggy” (President’s Commission 1967, p. 123).

Victimization surveys offered a new source of data that addressed the Commissions’ two pressing concerns. First, survey-based crime data could provide greater incident details than the existing aggregate-based UCR. Second, victimization data were separate from that collected by police. The unknown issue was whether victimization surveys would work, both in terms of respondents being willing to report victimization experiences and the ability to produce annual crime estimates. To test this method, the Presidential Commissions supported three sets of pilot victimization surveys: one household-based survey in Washington, DC; one group of city-based surveys; and one national sample. All of these pilots produced two important findings: (1) confirmation that victim surveys could provide reliable crime estimates and (2) identification that a significant amount of crime that occurred was never reported to the police (Cantor and Lynch 2000). These pilot surveys also helped to identify methodological issues, such as ways to facilitate recall, temporal placement, and collecting crimes against the household (Cantor and Lynch 2000).

Based on recommendations from the Commission and findings from methodological studies, the NCS was created and first implemented in 1972. Originally the NCS was a system of four victimization surveys – one national household sample (the Crime Panel), a city level household sample (the Central City surveys), and two Commercial Victimization Surveys (one at the national level and the other at the city level) (Rennison and Rand 2007). Only the Crime Panel survived and is what is referred to here as the NCS. The original goals for the NCS concerned providing an indicator of the crime problem independent of police data and the UCR and an ongoing measure of victimization risk (Rennison and Rand 2007). The NCS also served other purposes that included shifting the focus of the criminal justice system to the victim and away from the offender and providing a measure to assess changes in reporting to police (Rennison and Rand 2007). As a result of this close tie to monitoring the UCR, the crimes covered by the NCS were closely linked with the UCR crimes. The NCS crimes included rape, robbery, aggravated and simple assault, personal larceny (pickpocketing and purse snatching), burglary, motor vehicle theft, and property theft.

The NCS was a nationally representative sample of households. Initially all household members aged 14 and older were personally interviewed to determine their victimization experiences over the past 6 months. Those household members aged 12 and 13 were interviewed by proxy. The Census field staff conducted the NCS interviews in person and over the telephone using a paper and pencil instrument. The NCS consisted of three parts: the control card, the screening questionnaire, and the incident report. The control card collected household information and respondent demographics. The screening questionnaire ascertained if the respondent experienced a criminal victimization in the past 6 months, and the incident report collected details of each victimization incident reported. Households remained in the sample for 3½ years and were interviewed at 6-month intervals. Since the sample was of households and not individuals, those who moved out of the household were not followed, but rather the new residents were included in the sample for the remainder of time the household was in sample.

As with the summary UCR system, the NCS also underwent a significant redesign effort (see Cantor and Lynch 2000, for an in-depth discussion). The redesign efforts began almost as soon as the survey went into the field (Cantor and Lynch 2000). The NCS was a significant event for both those interested in survey methodology as well as social statistics. One area of criticism came from academics who challenged the significant financial expenditure on a data system that provided limited analysis options and few variables that could be used for theory testing (Cantor and Lynch 2000). Critiques also came from the law enforcement community who questioned this new survey-based crime data collection method and the associated criticisms of police-based crime data (Cantor and Lynch 2000). At one point, the NCS had attracted enough criticism that its sponsor the US Department of Justice considered discontinuing the survey until it could be redesigned (Lynch 1990). While the survey was never suspended, it was the subject of a reevaluation by National Academy of Sciences and a 5-year program of research, instrument development, and redesign planning (Lynch 1990).

The redesign effort focused on developing a better screening instrument to promote respondent recall of victimization incidents and revising the incident report to collect additional details about the victimization event (Cantor and Lynch 2000). Other redesign work concerned research devoted to recall periods, respondent fatigue, and other methodological issues (Cantor and Lynch 2000). Research and development of these efforts began in the 1980s and the redesigned NCVS was introduced into the field in 1992. Unlike the UCR’s NIBRS redesign effort which remains an ongoing project, the implementation of the redesigned NCVS instrument and methodology was completed in 18 months. The redesigned survey came with a new name: the National Crime Survey became the National Crime Victimization Survey.

The redesigned NCVS kept the same three part format (control card, screener, and incident report). Otherwise the survey had been completely overhauled, most noticeably in terms of the screener. The screener now included a series of short cues to prompt recall. In the NCS, each screener question corresponded to a particular crime, such as assault. In the NCVS, screener questions instead focused on aspects of the victimization such as where it occurred, what the respondent was doing at the time, and who committed the offense. The premise was to facilitate recall and to use various memory triggers to do so. In addition, new crimes were added as part of the screening process (vandalism and sexual assault) and specific prompts were added to better collect data on certain crimes that had been included in the NCS (rape and domestic violence). Rape and domestic violence were more clearly screened by including questions related to sexually based offenses and offenses committed by people known to the respondent. Additional crimes were also collected in supplemental questionnaires. These supplements increased after the redesign and concerned such topics as workplace violence, school crime, stalking, and identity theft. Other changes that occurred with the redesign concerned how the survey was administered with the introduction of computer-assisted telephone interviewing (or CATI) and how repeated (or series) crimes were counted. Rennison and Rand (2007) provide a comprehensive discussion of these and other changes.

The NCVS also has experienced additional changes since its redesign. Until recently, many of these changes centered on efforts to reduce costs as the NCVS has been flat funded for most of its existence since the redesign. The most significant of these changes has been the dramatic cut in sample size (Rennison and Rand 2007). Concurrent with the flat funding and sample cuts, external pressures demanded that the NCVS do more in terms of data collection and speed in releasing data. Additional questions were added concerning hate crimes, crimes against the disabled, computer crimes, and identity theft. The NCVS was also under pressure to produce its annual estimates more quickly (Rennison and Rand 2007).

The deep cuts to the NCVS program generated an unsustainable situation and a request by BJS for the National Academies’ Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) for a panel to review the NCVS and “consider alternative options for conducting the [NCVS].” (National Research Council 2008, p. 23). The CNSTAT Panel’s review found the NCVS was in need of more resources and restoration. Specifically “[a]s currently configured and funded, the NCVS is not achieving and cannot achieve BJS’s legislatively mandated goal to ‘collect and analyze data that will serve as a continuous and comparable national social indication of the prevalence, incidence, rates, extent, distribution, and attributes of crime .. .’” (National Research Council 2008, p. 78). The CNSTAT Panel offered many recommendations to restore the NCVS as well as an overall call to encourage appropriate funding of the survey. In response to this report, BJS began conducting a redesign effort to address the recommendations. These efforts have included restoring the sample size as well as efforts to generate subnational victimization estimates (BJS n.d.).

Similarities Between The UCR And NCS-NCVS In Their Origins And Development

While most discussions that examine both the UCR and NCS-NCVS focus on their differences and points where they diverge (see Biderman and Lynch 1991; Lynch and Addington 2007a), the two systems share many similarities with regard to their origins and development as well as the current demands and tensions under which each still operate. With regard to their origins, both the UCR and NCVS started from a need for better measures to inform the crime problem. For the UCR, law enforcement officials wanted to combat misperceptions of crime based on media-generated crime waves, and social scientists wanted empirical measures for studying crime. For the NCS, government officials and policymakers wanted to address a perceived increase in crime that could not be addressed with aggregate police data. Both also were developed as a way to obtain data that were closer to the crime problem than previously were available. For the UCR, previous crime statistics used data from courts or prisons. Decades later these police data would come under fire for being unreliable and subject to manipulation. Victimization data from the NCS provided a means to get closer to the criminal event and to avoid the police reporting filter.

In their development, both the UCR and NCSNCVS systems underwent massive redesign efforts. While the specific changes differed, both were based on changes in technology and in improved knowledge of the crime problem. Changes in technology permitted the UCR to have the capability to collect more detailed information on crime incidents as well as to accommodate the millions of cases generated by an incident-based system. The summary reporting system originated in the 1920s when handwritten tallies were considered state of the art. By the 1980s and 1990s, police agencies had the ability to provide more sophisticated crime data as their own collection and analysis programs were increasingly becoming computerized (Poggio et al. 1985). The technology also permitted scholars, policymakers, and others the statistical and computing capabilities to manipulate and analyze these data. The NCVS similarly benefited from advances in technology that enabled CATI interviewing and improved data collection. More sophisticated statistical software packages – particularly programs that could adjust for the NCSNCVS’s complex survey sample – extended the utility of the data for researchers.

Improvements in the knowledge of the crime problem also prompted changes for both the UCR and NCS. For the UCR, incident details provided by the NCS highlighted the summary reporting system’s limitations. With the available details from the NCS, researchers and policymakers began to demand the production of police data that provided incident-level information needed to explain the crime problem (Poggio et al. 1985). Solely providing aggregate level data was no longer sufficient. The NCS similarly was critiqued by scholars who demanded more details and explanatory variables to permit modeling of victimization risk and development of theories of victimization. Here the critiques came from the NCS itself. Once it was demonstrated that a victimization survey could produce reliable national estimates of crime, researchers and policymakers demanded more information. As with the UCR, annual estimates – even annual estimates coupled by additional incident details – were not enough.

Both the NCVS and UCR continue to face external demands and pressures, particularly to provide more information and to provide it more quickly. As discussed above, the NCVS has suffered the double burden of flat funding and increased demand for specific crime data and for producing these data more quickly. The UCR also has faced demands for faster release of crime data (e.g., Rosenfeld 2011) and for the collection of new crime types such as cargo theft (FBI 2011) and new crime definitions such as rape (FBI 2012). The UCR and NCVS must balance these demands for expansion and change with ongoing concerns. Both systems are charged with the task of generating annual level and change crime estimates. Data collection changes must be balanced with the need for series continuity. Both systems operate within budget and funding constraints that limit what each can do and how much data can be collected. Both also are essentially volunteer systems and must be concerned with overburdening their respondents – whether these data providers are individual law enforcement agencies and state data analysis centers (for the UCR) or individual survey respondents (for the NCVS).

Effect Of UCR And NCVS On Defining What Crime “Counts”

Unlike other social indicators, no natural metric exists for crime and as a result, the classification of crime and which crimes are included is a very important decision (Lynch and Addington 2007b; much of the following discussion draws upon this research paper). Since counting every crime would be an impossible task, both the UCR and NCS-NCVS needed to identify those crimes that would (and would not) be included in their data collection systems. Literally, these decisions determined what crimes “counted.” By doing so, certain crimes and aspects of those crimes are emphasized and others virtually disappear. In its summary system, the UCR elevated legal aspects of offenses and virtually excluded all other attributes of crime events. This decision was largely due to limits of police data at the time the UCR was created, but these choices continue to affect views of crime even though these same crimes might not be selected today. Given the NCS’s initial focus as a check on the UCR, the crimes captured by the NCS largely mirrored those of the UCR. The redesign of both systems increased the number of crimes that were counted. NIBRS has expanded UCR crimes particularly in the areas of fraud, drug-related crimes, forcible sex crimes other than rape, and kidnapping as well as incident details that permit identification of crimes against children and those involving intimates. The NCVS expanded the crimes it collected through supplements as well as added questions to the screening questionnaire.

The decision of what crimes are counted in each system has had far-reaching effects on views of what crime is. The paradigm of crime problem is one dominated by street crime and more serious crime. This focus has largely ignored criminal activity that is less serious, but more prevalent such as bullying, vandalism, minor assaults, and threats. These crimes do not result in great loss or injury, but can be consequential to community, schools, and other social institutions as well as neighborhood cohesion and feelings of safety. In addition, such crimes may be leading indicators of more serious crime and social problems.

The UCR and NCVS, however, do not have to be limited to this paradigm of serious, street crime. As discussed by Lynch and Addington (2007b), an ignored potential of both NIBRS and NCVS is to go beyond recreating the UCR summary system’s Index Crime Classification. By collecting incident-level details, the NCVS and NIBRS have the necessary information to experiment with alternative crime classifications. These alternative classifications can improve insights on crime and victimization for researchers and policymakers. Any crime classification needs to assess the risk that crime poses and does so in a way that can inform efforts to control this risk (Lynch and Addington 2007b). Rather than focusing on legal classifications, an alternative classification system could use categories that focus on relationship status, location, or activity at the time of the incident. Relationship status could compare strangers and intimates. Location could compare public and private places, and activities could focus on domains such as home, work, school, or leisure. These categories could be further defined using injury or property loss rather than legal definitions to separate violent and property crimes. Such a classification system emphasizes elements of the crime event rather than criminal behavior or legal definitions (Lynch and Addington 2007b). This scheme also directs attention away from a street crime paradigm of crime and permits more expansive consideration of the crime problem.

The NCVS and NIBRS already collect the necessary information to experiment with alternative crime classifications. Few researchers have capitalized on the opportunity to incorporate theses classifications in their work. This lack of work might be evidence of the pervasive effect of the original UCR crime classifications. Consideration of alternative classification models were mentioned in both redesign efforts. One basis for NCS redesign was to focus on victimization risk and ways for researchers to define crimes using different characteristics (Cantor and Lynch 2000). Designers of NIBRS identified several benefits of an incident-based system, one of which focused on the analytical flexibility that would allow “users to count and categorize crimes in ways they find meaningful” as well as “to explore a myriad of details about crime and law enforcement” (Poggio, et al. 1985, p. 4).

Conclusion

The importance of the UCR and NCS-NCVS cannot be emphasized enough, especially how they – separately and together – have shaped what is known about crime. These two measures of crime provide a rich source of information on trends over time, annual estimates of the crime problem, and details about the incident. While discussions of the UCR and NCS-NCVS often focus on the differences between the two and points where they diverge (Biderman and Lynch 1991; Lynch and Addington 2007a), the two systems share many similarities in their development over time. Both likely will continue to evolve over time as technology advances, as more is learned about crime, and as the demand for more detailed data continues.

The UCR and NCS-NCVS also have affected views of crime by defining what crimes count (and which do not). The UCR originally was viewed as speaking primarily to law enforcement agencies. It was not until its move to NIBRS were the needs of outside researchers and policymakers specifically acknowledged (Poggio et al. 1985). The NCS originated out of a need, in part, to monitor the UCR. Since the NCS’s redesign, calls have been made for the NCVS to turn away from this monitoring function (Cantor and Lynch 2000). With a change in focus for both systems, attention could be devoted to ways to address the crime problem through utilizing alternative crime classification systems as well as exploring techniques for measuring crimes that affect citizens on a more routine basis than serious violent street crimes.

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