Originally published in the Columbia Missourian on Aug. 10, 2022.
More than 100 Missouri law enforcement agencies failed to provide 2021 crime data to the FBI after it switched to a new crime statistics tracking system.
Nationwide, 2 of every 5 law enforcement agencies filed no crime data for 2021. In Missouri, 113 agencies filed no data, and another 165 provided only partial data, according to The Marshall Project, a nonprofit group that reports on criminal justice issues. The Marshall Project data indicates 314 Missouri agencies provided a full 12 months of crime reports.
The FBI is releasing crime figures nonetheless and believes the Bureau of Justice Statistics will be able to accurately estimate crime trends by extrapolating from the data it has.
Many agencies were hampered by a lack of staff or had problems with third-party records systems that allow them to provide crime data.
The FBI since the 1930s has produced uniform crime reports for the nation annually by using data provided by local law enforcement agencies. Beginning in the 1980s, the FBI began encouraging those agencies to make the transition from the Uniform Crime Reports system to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). A little over a year ago, the FBI announced that beginning in 2021 it would publish only the data reported using the new system.
Uniform crime reports sum up crimes in broad categories, and they only list the most serious crime committed in a single incident. The National Incident-Based Reporting System has over 50 more data elements, including the time of day a crime was committed and the race and age of victims.
Many law enforcement agencies, including those in large cities such as New York and Los Angeles, were unable to meet the deadline imposed by the FBI.
Richard Rosenfeld, an emeritus professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said the analysis of 2021 crime will miss out on a significant portion of crime data.
“What we’re going to have is a crime rate that’s based on data from just a little over 60% of all the police agencies, and that will exclude many major police departments, including New York City and Los Angeles.”
The Marshall Project data shows that most of the agencies in Missouri that failed to provide any reports for 2021, or only partial reports data, have populations of fewer than 8,000 people.
“People in those areas and anybody else who cares about crimes nationwide will be somewhat uncertain about what these new numbers represent, because so many of them will be based on estimates,” Rosenfeld said.
Justin Arnold, chief of the Ozark Police Department in southwest Missouri, said his agency made the transition to the National Incident-Based Reporting System on Jan. 1, but it missed the deadline for submitting data to the FBI because the Pennsylvania company that operates its records management system wasn’t ready for the switch.
“We have a lot of that data, but we just had no way — through the portals that you have to utilize — to submit it to the state of Missouri, who then submits it to the FBI,” Arnold said. “We had no way of importing that data because our (records management system) was not compatible with that at the time. We were at the mercy of our provider for that.”
The Ozark Police Department uses a record management system created by CODY, a data management company whose name is inspired by the grandson of Buffalo Bill Cody. CODY operates in many states and was unable to develop in time the back-end programming required for Missouri law enforcement agencies to communicate with the portal the state uses for crime reporting.
“I know about other agencies in the state of Missouri that also used CODY, and we were all in the same boat. We were actually communicating with each agency trying to work through these problems,” Arnold said. “I definitely think there are a lot of agencies that were in the same boat as us.”
Other data management providers were able to make the transition to the new crime reporting system sooner, but Arnold said it wouldn’t have been fiscally responsible to shift away from CODY.
“We couldn’t scrap what we had been doing for a decade and a half as far as utilizing our records management system and all the data we’ve been collecting,” Arnold said.
Maggie Rikers, vice president of sales and marketing for CODY systems, said the company is making adjustments in 18 states, which is taking time.
“There’s a lot of testing and certification that needs to go on, and not just for the vendors, but the agencies themselves,” Rikers said.
Rikers cited attention to detail as the reason her company is working slower than its competitors. When a new customer agency switches to CODY, it submits its crime reports for the past two years to the system and often finds “there were a lot of UCR reportable crimes and offenses that were never reported because the current (records management system) didn’t pick them up, whereas CODY did.”
The company was in need of modernizing the platform to be web-based, and it used the mandated transition to NIBRS as an opportunity to rewrite the platform, which is set to release early next year.
Appleton City, population 1,086 in west-central Missouri, has struggled for the past year and a half to retain police officers after its police chief resigned. It was unable to submit any data to the FBI for 2021 because there was no one to do it.
The St. Claire County Sheriff’s Department is helping Appleton City with law enforcement, but it doesn’t submit the town’s crime data. Sheriff Lee Hilty said his department made the reporting deadline by having one person spend weeks manually inputting all its 2021 data to the state rather than relying on an automated reporting system.
Hilty said Appleton City isn’t the only town with this issue.
“Some towns just don’t have police departments because they’re small,” he said. “Out of my three cities that are supposed to have police departments, I only have one that’s active right now.”
