Are some states not reporting violent crimes
Executive summary
Yes — significant gaps in federal violent‑crime statistics have occurred because many local agencies and some whole states did not fully report data to the FBI after the agency changed its reporting system, producing missing state‑level violent‑crime estimates and distorted national trends [1] [2].
1. What “not reporting” actually means and why it matters
“Not reporting” in the current national crime‑data debate usually means local law enforcement agencies failed to transmit their incident data into the FBI’s national collection, largely during and after the FBI’s migration to the National Incident‑Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which left state‑level and national estimates incomplete when participation was low [3] [1].
2. How widespread the gap has been
The gap has been substantial: independent reporting found that around 31–40 percent of the roughly 18,000 U.S. law enforcement agencies failed to report at various points after the NIBRS transition, producing missing state‑level violent‑crime estimates for multiple states including California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico and Pennsylvania in the FBI’s 2021 report [4] [1] [2].
3. Examples that show the problem at scale
Some outlets documented extreme cases: 247Wall St. and industry analyses noted that Florida’s agencies reported almost nothing to the FBI for 2021 (reporting as low as 0.2 percent of agencies), leaving violent‑crime figures for the state unavailable in the FBI dataset, and Maryland and parts of New York also showed low participation rates that created big holes in national totals [5] [2].
4. Why agencies stopped or struggled to report
Agencies cited technical and resource problems in adopting the new reporting standard—upgrades to NIBRS are complex and costly—and the federal government has limited ability to compel reporting, so adoption has been uneven and slow [6] [3]. Some local departments, like the NYPD, rely on their own tracking systems and argued that missing FBI submissions did not mean they lacked local crime data, even as that non‑reporting undermined the FBI’s national picture [6].
5. The consequences: distorted trends and political fights
Missing data made national violent‑crime trends unreliable in some years, prompting watchdog and media scrutiny; analysts warned the incomplete submission rates could render comparative state and national rates misleading and politically weaponized during elections [7] [1]. The controversy intensified when the House Oversight Committee accused the FBI of quietly revising national totals after initially reporting decreases, alleging the agency later added thousands of crimes to show an increase—an action that has driven congressional demands for documents and transparency [8].
6. Alternative viewpoints and limits of the available reporting
Not all observers conclude that non‑reporting fully explains changes in crime levels; some analysts emphasize victim underreporting to police and prosecutorial outcomes as separate limits of UCR‑based counts, while others argue missing agency submissions were temporary as more departments planned to migrate and report by 2025–2026 [9] [6]. Reporting here is limited to the cited investigations and watchdog analyses; there is insufficient material in the provided sources to state definitively which specific states were fully compliant after 2023 or to confirm the FBI’s most current participation rates beyond the documented 2021–2023 transition period [4] [10].
Conclusion
The record in multiple investigations and FBI participation data shows that many local agencies — and by extension some states’ totals — were not fully represented in national violent‑crime figures during and after the FBI’s transition to NIBRS, producing missing state‑level estimates and complicating national trend analysis; technical, resource and governance issues explain much of the gap, and disputes over the FBI’s revisions and transparency have politicized the problem [1] [2] [8].