I think that the National Incident-Based Repotting System (NIBRS) should be implemented by every law enforcement agency and be used to replace or at least phase out the Uniform Crime Report (UCR). The main issue with NIBRS replacing the UCR, is that there would be an immediate appearance in the increase of crime nationwide. This is because the UCR only records eight Part I crimes and utilizes the hierarchy rule, which states that only the most serious offense in a crime is documented with limited exceptions. (Mosher, Miethe, & Hart, 2011). This means that if a suspect commits more than one crime that is recorded by the UCR, then only the most serious crime out of the crimes committed will count to the yearly statistics of crime. Under the crime …show more content…
That means by using NIBRS, if a suspect(s) commits one or more crimes in the commission of the crime all of the crimes will be documented. Additionally, more crimes are covered by NIBRS compared to the UCR giving better statistical data coving more crimes to be studied. NIBRS also does a better job at identifying the information behind the crime, such as, victim to offender data and gives a better description of property damaged and/ or stolen. For all of these reasons, NIBRS is a far superior documentation on criminal statistics to the UCR and would benefit research into the field of criminology …show more content…
This is due to law enforcement better reporting and documenting the crimes that are already occurring. Additionally there would be no comparable data to compare the crime rates to for the first year and no reliable way to document crime trends for several more years or even decades. This is why it think it is important to phase in the implantation of NIBRS while still publishing UCR data for several years. This way there is still the ability to compare crime statistics to previous years using the UCR until there is enough data with NIBRS to fully replace the UCR. As long as the reason for the shift to NIBRS from the URC is explained along with explaining the reasons for the increase in appearance of the crime rate to the public, I would have no problem reporting the data collected by NIBRS to the public. I do have worries that the public and media would not fully comprehend the reasons behind the raise in the crime rate, but I think the increase in worry from the public is far outweighed by the benefits from long term studies using a more accurate documentation of crime data with NIBRS. It is important to note that there would need to be a large public awareness campaign associated with the switch to