The New Dawn of NIBRS: Race/Ethnicity and Crime Patterns and the NIBRS Transition

In 2021, the FBI sought to retire the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) Summary Reporting System (SRS) and fully transition to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). However, it is unclear how this transition to a “NIBRS-only” system might impact statistics on race/ethnicity and crime in the United States. To date, research offers few comparisons of race/ethnicity and crime patterns in NIBRS versus traditional UCR reporting systems. In addition, studies that provide these comparisons were conducted years ago (1) before the full transition to NIBRS when the program had limited coverage (less than 30% U.S. population coverage) and (2) before the rapid growth in U.S. minority groups and especially Hispanic populations seen throughout the twenty-first century. The current study addresses this gap in research by comparing racial/ethnic portraits of crime (cross-sectionally and over time) across four of the FBI's “public facing” official crime data systems—(1) Crime in the United States (CIUS) reports, (2) NIBRS Offender data, (3) NIBRS Arrestee data, and (4) NIBRS Arrestee National Estimates. Findings suggest that Black offending and arrest patterns are generally consistent across data sources, but depictions of Hispanic crime involvement differ sharply depending on which data source is used.