The FBI is the main government source of US crime data. Since 1930, it’s collected crime data from local law enforcement agencies through the Summary Reporting System (SRS). The FBI has used this data to estimate national, regional, and state crime statistics since the 1960s.
The FBI phased out the SRS in 2021 in favor of the more comprehensive National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which collects data on single incidents instead of aggregated summaries of crimes, allowing the data to capture more specific crime information.
The latest data available from the SRS is from 2020, while the NIBRS has data through 2025.
Law enforcement agencies are still transitioning to the new system. As of 2025, over 17,000 agencies representing nearly 97% of the US population had submitted data.
The FBI has always used partial population data to estimate crime outcomes, even in areas that don’t report. The more agencies that report data to the FBI, the more accurate the estimates become. This article uses data from both the NIBRS and the SRS to shed light on both recent geographic trends and trends over time.
Note that the FBI calculated the estimates used, applying recent NIBRS data to replicate the estimation methodology previously used for SRS data. This helps make the estimates comparable over time despite the change in reporting systems, although relatively lower reporting rates during the transition to NIBRS may still impact accuracy, so the data provided throughout this piece can still be used to approximate crime rate trends over time.
