Local, state and federal agencies generate NIBRS data from their records management systems.
With this initiative, the Uniform Crime Reporting program began under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
SRS, until recently, defined rape as "the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will" but since has been expanded.
When multiple crimes are committed by a single person or group of persons during the same basic period of time and same basic location, SRS uses a "Hierarchy Rule" (see UCR for details) to determine which offenses will be reported for that incident.
Finally, agencies submit SRS data in written documents that must then be hand entered into a computer system for statistical analysis.
As of October 31, 2020, 8,742 law enforcement agencies representing 48.9 percent of the population were reporting NIBRS data to the UCR program.
At that time, 43 states were NIBRS-certified as having records management systems that meet the FBI's requirement for collecting crime data according to established technical specifications.
[3] As of January 1, 2022, 11,794 law enforcement agencies representing 69 percent[4] of the population were reporting NIBRS data to the UCR program.
As of the 2023 Quarter 2 Uniform Crime Report data with 13,363 participating agencies (out of 18,892 agencies across the country) the FBI was still "unable to make confident statements about national crime trends" because of incomplete participation which did not achieve a "minimum of 60 percent population coverage for these most in-population cities"[7] (for example, at the time, NYPD and LAPD were both missing data[8]).
For example, the Texas system (TIBRs) includes an additional segment (Segment Level 8) with additional data elements such as number of drug labs or fields seized, precursor drug chemicals involved and family violence data.
The South Carolina system (SCIBRs) includes data like second location type, victim's usage of drugs or alcohol and space for additional offenses on arrests (other than the specific offense for which the person was arrested).
The data submitted via this segment includes the arrest date, type and offense code.