The Pros And Cons Of The National Incident-Based Reporting System

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In 1985, a joint task force of the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI was created to study and recommend ways to improve the quality of information contained in the UCR (UCR Study Task Force, 1985). This resulted in the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the first collection of data began in 1991. Under NIBRS, participating law enforcement authorities provide offense and arrest data on 22 broad categories of crime covering 46 offenses while providing only arrest information on 11 other offenses (Bohm and Haley, 2012). The advantages of the NIBRS as compared to the UCR is that the NIBRS provides more data on each crime, making it possible to examine crimes in much more detail. It is hoped by the FBI that eventually the

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