The National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS), National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and the Uniform Crime Reporting programs are programs that gather data on reported crimes from police and federal agencies. The accuracy of information at the federal level is dependent on the accuracy of information at the local level. Underreporting is an issue for all three of these programs because many crimes go unreported to law enforcement period.
In 2012, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report that estimated that over half of violent crimes never get reported. The report cited a variety of reasons for the large number of unreported crimes from not believing it was important enough to report to not reporting for fear of retribution. Sometimes the victims did not believe that the police would be able to help. Also, crimes involving places such as school or work where the victims felt they had to return had an increased number of unreported crimes. These incidences of underreporting at a local level greatly impact the data that larger crime statistics programs can gather.
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