Which states report crime data
Last checked
The FBI runs the national crime reporting system. Police departments join it voluntarily. We counted how many have, using the FBI’s own registry of law enforcement agencies, and the answer is 63.5% — 12,929 of 20,362 agencies.
The national figure is not the interesting part. The spread between states is.
Where the gaps are
Share of each state’s law enforcement agencies certified for NIBRS, the FBI’s incident-level reporting system. States with at least 20 agencies, worst first.
| State | Agencies | Certified |
|---|---|---|
| Pennsylvania | 1,510 | 15% |
| New York | 726 | 28% |
| Florida | 490 | 39% |
| Alaska | 58 | 43% |
| Louisiana | 332 | 48% |
| Mississippi | 330 | 52% |
| Wyoming | 101 | 53% |
| South Dakota | 245 | 55% |
| North Dakota | 188 | 56% |
| Georgia | 745 | 57% |
At the other end, Connecticut is at 100%, Massachusetts 93%, Delaware 83%, New Hampshire and Ohio 81%. Two states have every agency certified.
Pennsylvania is the outlier
Pennsylvania has 1,510 law enforcement agencies, more than any other state in this list, and 234 of them are certified. That is 15%.
The number is large because Pennsylvania is unusually fragmented — a great many small borough and township departments, each of which has to adopt the system separately. Adoption costs money and staff time that a nine-officer department does not have spare. The result is a state where most of the police organisations do not feed the national system.
Why NIBRS specifically
The FBI used to collect a simple count: for each incident, the single most serious offence, and nothing else. NIBRS replaced it with a record of every offence in an incident, plus detail about location, time and circumstances.
That detail is what makes crime data usable below the level of a whole city. Without it you can say a city reported some number of burglaries. With it you can say something about a neighborhood. An uncertified agency is not necessarily silent — but what it can contribute is much coarser.
What this does not say
Two limits, because both are easy to overstate and we would rather say them than have them found.
- Certified is not the same as reporting. An agency can be certified and still submit nothing in a given year. This counts certification, which is the ceiling on what a state can contribute, not the actual figure.
- We are not giving a population number. It would be the more striking statistic — how many people live under a department that is not certified — and we cannot honestly produce it from this data. Agency jurisdictions overlap: a city police department, a county sheriff and the state police all cover the same residents, so agency populations sum to far more than the population of the country. Untangling that properly is a separate piece of work, and quoting the naive sum would be wrong.
How we counted
From the FBI’s public registry of law enforcement agencies: every agency with an ORI identifier, deduplicated so agencies spanning several counties are counted once, grouped by state, split on whether the registry marks them NIBRS-certified. States with fewer than 20 agencies are excluded from the table because the percentage gets noisy.
There is nothing proprietary in that. Anyone can reproduce it from the same public registry, and we would rather they could.
What it means if you are choosing where to live
Mostly it means being careful about comparisons that cross a state line. Two neighborhoods in different states can be described with very different underlying data quality, and almost no consumer site tells you which is which.
It also means a quiet-looking area is sometimes just an area nobody has reported on. That is why we leave places blank rather than drawing them when the underlying reporting is too thin — more on that here, and the gaps are visible on the crime map.