evidence: Crime is a huge topic in elections this November, and the FBI has now entered the chat. It has just released the Crime in the Nation report for 2021. But the bureau switched the way it collects crime data this year, and many police departments did not get on board. Los Angeles and New York City did not report to the FBI. In fact, only 63% of the country's police departments submitted anything, and some of the data that was submitted was incomplete. Weihua Li of The Marshall Project has been poring over the FBI's findings. Hey there. [...] LI: Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good question. And it's something that criminologists and people who work in criminal justice have been very worried about for a while now. So the FBI is used to receiving data from more than 90% of police departments across the country. But like you said earlier, in 2021, because they changed their data collection method, the number have dropped to roughly 60%. So instead of saying a finite number, you know, X number of crimes took place, they're saying we think the range of crime that took place in 2021 is somewhere between Y and Z. So for violent crime, property crime and homicides, the number of crimes could have gone up, gone down or stayed the same. We really don't know.