Jurisdiction Reporting

Crime Counts:  Jurisdiction and City/Twp Code Usage A basic tenet of Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) is to accurately depict the nature and extent of crime in a particular community.  According to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) UCR guidelines, investigations conducted into crimes that occurred outside the investigating agency's jurisdiction, should be relayed to the agency with the most local jurisdiction for reporting whenever possible. It is important that agencies understand how reporting incidents that happen outside of their jurisdiction affects crime counts published by the Michigan Incident Crime Reporting Unit (MICR) and by the FBI.

Crime counts published by the FBI in their Crime Data Explorer, and in other national reports, are calculated and displayed according to the ORI that covers a particular jurisdiction.  These reports do not consider the actual city/township code that was reported to MICR for each incident.  For example, if a local police department takes a complaint on a university campus who has their own police department, in statistical reports the FBI will attribute that crime to the local police department's jurisdiction and will not attribute that crime to the university.  Similarly, if a university police department takes a complaint off of campus in the local police department's jurisdiction, the FBI will attribute that crime to the university and not to the local police department's jurisdiction.  This is the case for any local or county agency that reports a crime outside of their local jurisdiction.  The FBI will attribute those crimes to the primary city, university, or county for that agency, not the actual city/township/university where the crime occurred.

On the other hand, MICR publishes crime counts for both ORI and by county and city/township codes in separate reports.  By reviewing MICR reports, you can determine the activity of each law enforcement agency counted by ORI or the actual crimes that occurred in a particular geographic location based on county and city/township codes.

Agencies should continue to report crimes for which they are the primary investigators and should continue to utilize accurate city/township codes to describe the geographic locations where those crimes take place.  Agencies should be aware, however, that the crime counts published by the FBI, by ORI, will differ from the crime counts MICR publishes by city/township code as outlined above.  It is important that an agreement be in place with any jurisdiction that an agency is operating in, outside of their own jurisdiction, and that both agencies are aware of the impact this has on statistical reporting.

For a complete explanation of the FBI's jurisdictional guidelines, please see Section 1.4 of the National Incident-Based Reporting System User Manual.