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I understand that curt (especially) is getting his information from what I think we both would consider "reliable" sources. The issue with the UCR/NIBRS is there are several things that have been the bane of the their existence, and which DOJ rarely talks about. The big one is standardization of information. FBI says agencies are to fill out the information from the "arrest" record. This creates a huge issue when the charges change, and "innocent until proven guilty" arises and the "suspect" isn't charged with a homicide because the charges were dropped. That opens the agency up to huge lawsuits. Something the DOJ didn't think of.
I've cited a couple of different articles that include issues DOJ (inclusive) and others have seen are problems.
What Can FBI Data Say About Crime in 2021? It’s Too Unreliable to Tell
Nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country did not submit any data in 2021 to a newly revised FBI crime statistics collection program, leaving a massive gap in information sure to be exploited by politicians in midterm election campaigns already dominated by public fear over a rise in violent crime.
The gap includes the nation’s two largest cities by population, New York City and Los Angeles, as well as most agencies in five of the six most populous states: California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
In 2021, the FBI retired its nearly century-old national crime data collection program, the Summary Reporting System used by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. The agency switched to a new system, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which gathers more specific information on each incident. Even though the FBI announced the transition years ago and the federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help local police make the switch, about 7,000 of the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies did not successfully send crime data to the voluntary program last year.
FBI Moves to Fix Critical Flaw in Its Crime Reporting System
In response to an investigation by Newsy, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica, the bureau says it has expedited a process expected to change reporting rules and require police to disclose cases they classify as unfounded.
NEW ORLEANS — The FBI will fast-track a fix to address flaws in its uniform crime report and is expected to change reporting rules to encourage more transparency about the outcomes of investigations by local law enforcement agencies, following a yearlong investigation by Newsy, Reveal from the Center For Investigative Reporting and ProPublica.
The investigation uncovered a major flaw in the FBI’s next generation crime reporting system, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The new system does not track cases police classify as “unfounded,” a category for when police say the victim is lying or the reported crime did not occur.
In our November investigation, we found that the FBI reports zero unfounded cases for thousands of agencies using the new system, although records from those agencies show they classify many cases this way.
For example, the Prince William County Police Department in Virginia showed no unfounded cases in the FBI crime statistics for 2016. However, internal department records show that Prince William County police classified nearly 40 percent of all rape cases as unfounded that year.
“You have found something that needs to be corrected,” said Col. Edwin C. Roessler Jr., chairman of the FBI’s NIBRS transition task force, and chief of police in Fairfax County, Virginia. “This is a crisis, an emergency.”
