FBI records show increase in murders during 2021, but data is incomplete

The murder rate in the United States slightly increased during 2021, according to an annual estimate released by the FBI on Wednesday. However, officials are warning that the estimate might be incomplete.

The 2021 Crime in the Nation Report, which is one of the most comprehensive data analyses of crime in the U.S., found that murders increased by 4.3% in 2021, from 22,000 to 22,900. The increase comes after a 29.4 percent increase from 2019 to 2020.

On the other hand, violent crime across the nation slightly decreased by 1%, from 1,326,600 incidents last year to 1,313,200 this year.

"The robbery rate decreased 8.9% from 2020 to 2021, which heavily contributed to the decrease in overall violent crime despite increases in murder and rape rates at the national level," the FBI wrote in a press release.

However, experts are warning that the FBI’s national figures for crime might be based on heavily estimated data after the agency changed how law enforcement agencies are required to report crimes.

The agency has said that its move to the data collection system called NIBRS (National Incident Based Reporting System), which requires greater detail and effort in logging crimes, has lowered agency participation rates. Thereby many incidents may have gone unreported and the national crime trends might be different than the report's estimates.

According to CNN, only 63% of the nation’s law enforcement agencies submitted data for 2021, the lowest level of participation in the report since 1979. Additionally, only 52% submitted a full year’s worth of data.

Additionally, the national crime estimates excluded data from two of the country’s largest cities, New York and Los Angeles.

“We are currently in a period in which there’s a significant concern with crime and violent crime in particular,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist, and professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. “So this is exactly the wrong time to be producing crime statistics that are so significantly based on estimates.”