D.C. and Prince George’s County police submit incomplete 2021 crime data

The District’s police division failed to totally report its 2021 crime knowledge to the FBI, making it a part of the 60% of legislation enforcement businesses nationwide that submitted incomplete knowledge or no knowledge in any respect, in accordance with knowledge given to Axios from a partnership with The Marshall Challenge.

• The information lapse additionally occurred in neighboring Prince George’s County — which like D.C. noticed a spike in murders and violent crime final yr.

Why it issues, through The Marshall Challenge: The Washington area is a part of a nationwide knowledge hole that consultants say will make it tougher to research crime knowledge and fact-check claims politicians make about crime.

• “It may be actually exhausting for policymakers to take a look at what crime seems to be like in their very own neighborhood and evaluate it to related communities,” Jacob Kaplan, a criminologist at Princeton College, instructed The Marshall Challenge.

The backdrop, through The Marshall Challenge: Final yr, the FBI retired its practically century-old nationwide crime knowledge assortment program and switched to a brand new system, the Nationwide Incident-Based mostly Reporting System, which gathers extra particular data on every incident.

• Though the FBI introduced the transition in 2015 and the federal authorities spent a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to assist native police make the change, practically 7,000 of the nation’s 18,000 legislation enforcement businesses didn’t ship crime knowledge to the voluntary program in 2021.

In the meantime, Montgomery, Arlington, and Loudoun counties and the town of Alexandria totally reported their 2021 crime knowledge.

What occurred: In D.C., the Metropolitan Police Division says it switched from the previous knowledge assortment reporting system to the brand new one on Aug. 1, 2021. However, because the new reporting system requires a full yr of knowledge so as to be printed, D.C.’s knowledge from 2021 shouldn’t be out there, the division says.

The Prince George’s County Police Division mentioned a technical problem led to its knowledge lapse.

• The division mentioned it started reporting crime knowledge to the brand new FBI system in 2019 utilizing a file format that was not suitable with Maryland’s personal reporting system.
• The county as an alternative reported on to the FBI, however says it submitted half of its 2021 knowledge after the FBI’s deadline for inclusion in its annual report.

What’s subsequent: D.C. police mentioned its crime knowledge could be printed quarterly by the FBI beginning this yr.