James J. Nolan, III, West Virginia University
F. Carson Mencken, Baylor University
Jack McDevitt, Northeastern University
The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is an incident-based crime reporting program for local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. Within each criminal incident, NIBRS captures information on offenses, victims, offenders, property, and persons arrested. The ability to link and analyze this detailed information is a significant improvement to the existing Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. NIBRS is rich with information about bias crimes reported to the police, and particularly about juveniles who are victims and offenders of these crimes. However, NIBRS is a very large and complex dataset, a fact that has become an impediment to its full utilization. Please visit the page MORE ABOUT NIBRS AND THE UCR HATE CRIME DATA COLLECTION PROGRAM for more details.
This project was supported by Grant 2001-JR-BX-0006 awarded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), U.S. Department of Justice to West Virginia University. It has two primary goals: (1) To conduct an analysis of NIBRS hate crime data reported between 1995 and 2000 (focusing on juvenile victims and offenders) and (2) To provide direction to other analysts and researchers in terms of accessing and analyzing NIBRS data. (Please see the Acknowledgments.)
1. The Analysis path takes the visitor to a listing of tables and graphs created from the NIBRS data. The analyses focus on hate crime incidents, victims, and offenders. There is also a special analysis section that examines religious and sexual orientation bias crimes and bias crimes that occur at schools and colleges.
Note: Each table can be copied and pasted into a Microsoft Excel file so that users can create their own graphics or conduct their own additional analyses. See Copying Tables to Microsoft Excel for more details.
2. The Accessing Data path provides four ready-to-use data sets and codebooks. Three of the data sets are in SPSS format and one is in Microsoft ACCESS format. The SPSS files are set up based on three different units of analysis: 1) incident (N = 5,855), 2) offender (N = 7,566), and 3) victim (N = 7,070). The Microsoft ACCESS 2000 database contains seven tables in a relational database format and a number of pre-programmed queries. Again, these databases are ready-to-use and set up so that users can download and create their own tables along with other types of analysis.
For further information on this study contact Dr. James J. Nolan in the Division of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University at (304)293-5801 ext. 3210 or by e-mail at jim.nolan@mail.wvu.edu