Back in the day, it was a Thursday ... ok, it was May 14.
Each year the public pores over FBI crime statistics. A great number of pieces are written about "safest communities," "most dangerous," and countless attempts to fingerpoint and identify trends. These reports are vital, important and do provide a great deal of useful information for communities and the law enforcement that protect them. (Since it's the end of the school year for so many there's a report card pun somewhere in here ... but I think that's not the purpose of the stats.)
But each community is different. And that makes each reporting just slightly different throughout the country. Could this create a missinterpretation of the data? In a blog posted on the mentioned date, Spillman writes, "while some states and agencies provide comprehensive crime reporting through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), the majority of agencies report Summary crime reporting data, which is not as comprehensive."
They explain further the efforts going into helping more and more agencies throughout the country present, or report, data in a more simplified way. Thus the FBI created the National Crime Statistics Exchange (NCS-X). The describe the purposes, reasoning's, and if you dig further into their wealth of knowledge they discuss the trends of moving "toward clear-cut transparency and an emphasis on data-driven and community policing."
Spillman shares a short chart of how data sets are "simplified" and designed to lessen any overlap. This chart is brief because, spoiler here, the actual document (also linked to in the blog), runs 15 pages long. Could this ... 1, help more report more agencies report incidents to the FBI? And/or 2, if we're all on the same page, wouldn't a decrease in any discrepancies help data be just that much more accurate?
Thank you.
