Crime statistics “no longer include data from 30% of the country including the biggest and most violent cities.”
The feds for years had announced the change was coming, but many agencies did not switch in time to submit data, including the New York City Police Department and Los Angeles Police Department — the nation’s two largest. Some entire states, including California and Florida, sent virtually no data. To make up for the data holes, the Justice Department created new estimation methods that use data from agencies that did submit to the FBI to fill in the blanks for the rest of the country. In some cases, the FBI didn’t even have enough information to make an estimation. Here are a few examples of what the FBI could not include in its 2021 crime report: [...] This problem could persist for years, as upgrading reporting systems has proven expensive and complicated for police agencies. The Los Angeles Police tried for years and had to start from scratch. The San Francisco Police Department previously told The Marshall Project that they don’t plan to send crime data to the FBI until 2025.