ABSTRACT

The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) disaggregates crime clearances into crimes cleared by arrest and crimes cleared by exceptional means. This feature is an improvement to the Summary Reporting System and allows law enforcement agencies to perform cross-jurisdiction comparisons of their clearance practices and investigative performances. This study uses sexual assault clearance rates to demonstrate a method of cross-jurisdiction comparison, which can be used to improve agency practices. Findings show much variability in sexual assault clearance rates across agencies, but most of this variation is explained by agency use of clearance by exceptional means. Further, no single agency characteristic examined here explained variability in exceptional clearance rates. Finally, there was additional agency variation in the offense type used to clear a sexual assault by arrest. The article concludes with a discussion of the importance of NIBRS for advancing law enforcement research and practice and the need for greater attention to data quality in NIBRS.

摘要

国家基于事件的报告系统 (NIBRS) 将犯罪清除分为通过逮捕清除的犯罪和通过特殊方式清除的犯罪。此功能是对汇总报告系统的改进，允许执法机构对其清除做法和调查表现进行跨辖区比较。本研究使用性侵犯清除率来展示一种跨辖区比较方法，该方法可用于改进机构实践。调查结果显示，各机构的性侵犯清除率存在很大差异，但大多数这种差异可以通过机构通过特殊方式使用清除来解释。此外，这里检查的单一机构特征没有解释异常清除率的可变性。最后，用于通过逮捕清除性侵犯的犯罪类型存在其他机构差异。文章最后讨论了 NIBRS 对推进执法研究和实践的重要性，以及需要更加关注 NIBRS 中的数据质量。