Florida is slow to move to new FBI crime reporting system

Florida’s almost 400 legislation enforcement companies didn’t report 2021 crime numbers to the FBI, becoming a member of the almost 40% of companies nationwide that failed to take action, in keeping with data supplied to Axios by The Marshall Challenge, a legal justice watchdog group.

Why it issues: Florida was a part of a pattern that may lead to an information hole that specialists say makes it more durable to research crime developments and fact-check claims politicians make about crime.

• “It’ll be actually exhausting for policymakers to have a look at what crime seems to be like in their very own group and examine it to comparable communities,” Jacob Kaplan, a criminologist at Princeton College, instructed The Marshall Challenge.

The massive image: Practically 40% of legislation enforcement companies across the nation, together with departments in New York Metropolis, Los Angeles and your complete state of California, didn’t submit any knowledge for 2021.

The backdrop: Final 12 months, the FBI retired its almost century-old nationwide crime knowledge assortment program and switched to a brand new system, the Nationwide Incident-Primarily based Reporting System (NIBRS), which gathers extra particular data on every incident.

• The FBI introduced the transition years in the past and the federal authorities spent a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to assist native police make the change, but almost 7,000 of the nation’s 18,000 legislation enforcement companies didn’t ship 2021 crime knowledge to the voluntary program.

Zoom in: The state company orchestrating the transition — the Florida Division of Regulation Enforcement — tells Axios it’ll start publishing detailed crime knowledge utilizing the brand new system later this 12 months.

• “Florida is within the means of transitioning,” FDLE spokesperson Jeremy Burns instructed Axios. “For a interval of some years, each summary-based and incident-based will probably be reported.”

Flashback: State companies have used so-called summary-based reporting — capturing solely the seven most severe crimes — since 1971.

What’s subsequent: The brand new system, known as the Florida Incident-Primarily based Reporting System, will collect far more details about every crime than previous summary-based reporting.

• For instance, if a suspect commits housebreaking, motorized vehicle theft and aggravated assault, all three crimes will probably be reported. Underneath the outdated system, solely essentially the most severe crime was reported.
• It is also much more expansive than NIBRS, gathering details about a number of state-specific legal offense classes.