Boycotting the Uniform Crime Report: Organizational Theory Analysis of the Causes and Consequences of Cooperative Failures by Police for Federal Crime Reporting

The rate at which local and state police and sheriff’s departments fully and accurately report crime data to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 94-year-old Uniform Crime Report has been deteriorating in recent years. Police underreporting of homicides, for example, has worsened significantly over time so that nearly one in four murders went unreported to the federal government in 2020, the lowest reporting rate on record. This decline occurred during the run-up to the federal mandate that police must upgrade their reporting systems by 2021 to the more complex National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). This chapter examines in detail the extent to which interagency cooperation can be explained and predicted by organizational theory and explores, statistically, the nature of these cooperative failures. A regression analysis of reporting rates among 3131 counties found homicide underreporting was most likely to occur in rural areas, counties with high poverty rates, politically conservative areas, counties with relatively high homicide rates, urban counties that do not contain FBI field offices, and in states that generally have poor crime reporting traditions. The implications of these findings to interagency cooperation and police organizational theory are discussed.