For 90 years, the primary source of information on crimes recorded by U.S. law enforcement was the Summary Reporting System (SRS) of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. A central strength of the SRS was its participation rate: nearly all law enforcement agencies in the United States submitted data annually. However, the SRS did not collect basic information on the circumstances surrounding crime incidents, such as details on victims, offenders, and other incident characteristics. Recognizing the need for detailed data to address the changing complexities of crime over time, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the principal statistical agency in the U.S. Department of Justice, collaborated with the FBI on the Blueprint for the Future of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program. This was the springboard from which the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) launched in the late 1980s.

Like the SRS, NIBRS enables crime data to be standardized and compared across agencies and states. Unlike the SRS, NIBRS captures detailed information on each crime incident—and each offense that occurred during the incident—that law enforcement reports to the FBI. That includes a broader set of offenses that more accurately reflect the nature of crime in communities, including victim demographics, known offender demographics, relationships between victims and offenders, arrestee information, and property or drugs seized during an incident. NIBRS also has added data quality and consistency checks to improve the data being collected. NIBRS makes it possible for U.S. crime statistics to move beyond the SRS’s basic offense counts, as well as enabling agencies to develop strategic and pragmatic evidence-based crime interventions.