Maine in the middle of the pack on reporting crime statistics to FBI

Lower than half of legislation enforcement businesses in Maine have submitted a full scope of information to the FBI for the total calendar 12 months of 2021, in accordance with an investigation by The Marshall Venture.

Practically all of Maine’s 133 legislation enforcement businesses have submitted at the least partial information for 2021. Six businesses — Rumford, Gardiner, Searsport, Oxford, Millinocket and Richmond — did not report any information. 

The gaps in information current challenges to investigate crime developments and fact-check claims, typically made by politicians, on crime statistics. 

A number of the largest police departments within the nation such because the New York and Los Angeles police departments have been among the many 40 % of businesses that didn’t report any information, The Marshall Venture discovered. 

Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia had increased reporting charges than Maine, which ranked twenty sixth in a listing of states with the very best proportion of legislation enforcement businesses reporting a full 12 months of information. Maine recorded 47 % of businesses offering 12 months of information.

The shortage of information assortment comes because the FBI launched a brand new information assortment system, the Nationwide Incident-Based mostly Reporting System in 2021 after retiring its practically century-old Abstract Reporting System. 

Though the transition was introduced years in the past, practically 7,000 of the nation’s 18,000 legislation enforcement businesses did not “ship crime information to the voluntary program final 12 months,” in accordance with The Marshall Venture investigation. 

A pair of New England states do the most effective job at reporting full information to the FBI: Rhode Island (92 %) and Vermont (89 %), which places them at first and third, respectively, within the state rankings. 

Connecticut ranked ninth (76 %), whereas Massachusetts ranked 14th (60 %) and New Hampshire thirty third (41 %). 

Consultants and legislation enforcement officers informed The Marshall Venture it is going to take years and hundreds of thousands of {dollars} for a big police division to transition its information storage system so it might report crime statistics to the FBI’s new system, that means nationwide crime statistics are poised to be unreliable for years.

“It’s going to be actually exhausting for policymakers to take a look at what crime appears like in their very own group and evaluate it to comparable communities,” Jacob Kaplan, criminologist at Princeton College, informed The Marshall Venture. 

To learn extra in regards to the challenges these information gaps current, learn What Can FBI Information Say About Crime in 2021? It’s Too Unreliable to Inform from The Marshall Venture. 

To discover the information compiled by The Marshall Venture, try See If Police in Your State Reported Crime Information to the FBI.

George Harvey is the multimedia editor of The Maine Monitor. Attain him by electronic mail: george@themainemonitor.org.