Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) is a program that was formed in 1929 with the objective of meeting reliable and uniform crime statistics. It was first used by International Association of Chiefs of Police and later by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with the call for amassing, reporting and archiving the data. The program is valuable to researchers, criminal justice students, law enforcement directories and the public seeking for crime related information (FBI, 2015). Annual publications such as Hate Crime Statics (HCS), Crime in the United States (CUS), Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA), and National Incident-Based Reporting Systems (NIBRS) use this data received from voluntary participatory such as county, tribal, law enforcement bureaus, college/university state and over other 18,000 cities. The data is then submitted either straight to the UCR Program of the FBI or through UCR Program of the state.
Additionally, the same reports can be found in the NIBRS, LEOKA, SRS and HCS platforms. The FBI has taken full redevelopment and redesign of the program for over 30 years (Eckberg, 2014). The bureau, through its Criminal Justice Information Division, has created UCR Development Project to run, develop and integrate advanced information system solution. The initiative’s primary goals are to improve UCR conceivability, adoption, and adeptness.
Despite its importance, most UCR reports are limited to crimes recognized by the law enforcement agencies, and crimes that are considered most solemn. The majority of the victims tend to fear reprisal or regard crimes as private and dull hence ending up not reporting. Such incidences have increased the dark figure of crime making the UCR reports invalid and unrealistic. Therefore, law enforcement agencies need to reform the program to improve the legality and reliability of the official statistics.
References
Eckberg, D. (2014). Trends in Conflict Uniform Crime Reports, the National Crime Victimization Surveys, and the Lethality of Violent Crime. Homicide Studies, 1088767914557810.
FBI. (2015). Uniform Crime Reports. Retrieved from FBI Online https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr
