CCJ releases big new report, "Better Crime Data, Better Crime Policy"

The Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) continues its important and timely work on modern crime realities with the release of this new report from its Crime Trends Working Group, titled "Better Crime Data, Better Crime Policy."   I received a emailed press release about the report this morning, and here it text from that email serving as a helpful summary:

Despite recent improvements, national crime data fall short of what the country needs to sufficiently understand, control, and prevent crime, the Council on Criminal Justice Crime Trends Working Group said today in a report outlining a roadmap for improvement.  Calling for urgent action, the report, Better Crime Data, Better Crime Policy, presents a set of recommendations to strengthen the nation’s crime data infrastructure and better equip policymakers with timely, accurate, and usable data essential to effectively address community violence and other crime. 

Composed of 16 expert producers and consumers of crime data from law enforcement, state and local government, public health, academia and the advocacy community, the Working Group said that unlike readily available data on inflation and unemployment trends, national crime data lag by many months.  That delay hinders government and community leaders as they seek to spot emerging crime issues and deploy appropriate interventions, a problem that has become more serious in recent years as the internet, social media, and other technologies have fostered the rapid spread of new types of crime.  

In addition, the lack of real-time national data — which crimes are rising, which are falling, and by how much — can distort public perceptions of trends and prompt changes to strategies and policies based on anecdote rather than evidence, the report said.... 

The Working Group proposed action in multiple areas by federal, state, and local agencies, focusing on improvements to the timeliness, accuracy, completeness, and usability of crime data. Key recommendations in the report include:  

• In partnership with the FBI, the CDC, and other federal agencies, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) should publish a comprehensive annual compendium of crime in the U.S., starting in 2025, that simultaneously reports law enforcement and victimization survey data and includes cybercrime, hate crime, securities fraud, and other important types of crime. 
• BJS should begin next year publishing monthly crime statistics from a nationally representative sample of cities, similar to how the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases employment statistics on the first Friday of every month. 
• The FBI should develop a plan to increase the number of law enforcement agencies reporting to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to cover 90% of the U.S. population by the end of 2025 and 98% by the end of 2027, matching the level of coverage prior to the switch to NIBRS. States not already reporting monthly should enact or strengthen laws requiring local law enforcement agencies to report NIBRS-compliant crime data to state UCR programs on a monthly basis. 
• The CDC should improve the health surveillance systems that collect information on violent deaths and firearms assaults and injuries by directing the National Center for Health Statistics to develop a plan to address the systematic miscoding of firearms assaults and injuries in hospital discharge coding.
• Congress should provide BJS with funds to establish a National Justice Data Analysis Center that would define national best practices for law enforcement agencies to visualize and share data, provide training and technical assistance to help agencies deploy data to improve crime analysis and prevention, and enhance crime trends data science. 

To implement its recommendations, the Working Group recommended that Congress increase BJS appropriations to $75 million for FY2025, scaling up to $93 million in FY2026. In addition, the Group made several one-time and annual funding recommendations for other federal agencies, including the FBI, the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).