The FBI’s crime reporting program is considered the final word on crime trends in the United States, but the agency rarely audits police agencies providing the information and when it does its reviews are too cursory to identify deep flaws.
In each of the past five years, FBI auditors have reviewed crime statistics at less than 1% of the roughly 17,000 departments that report data, a Journal Sentinel examination of FBI records has found. In all, they’ve audited as many as 652 police agencies during that time, or less than 4% of the total.
And a Journal Sentinel survey of police departments in the 30 largest U.S. cities found that nearly two-thirds have not been audited in the past five years.