The FBI released its national crime data report for last year, but a staggering 40% of police departments across the United States did not provide information for inclusion.

Beginning in January 2021, the FBI moved its reporting system to a new program, which was intended to provide a more real-time look at crime statistics nationwide. Yet with a March 2022 deadline for submission of final data sets utilizing the new program, 40% of departments did not comply.

Jacob Kaplan, a criminologist at Prince University, told Fox News, “I don’t think you could get national numbers, at least not useful national numbers, from this data.”

According to the Marshall Project, most police departments in Florida, California, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania failed to report their data sets. The New York City and Los Angeles police departments, two of the nation’s largest, were among those who did not submit data.

Of the 60% of departments that did submit data sets to the FBI, some were incomplete. Only 52% of the departments who participated submitted complete data sets for 2021.

“It’s going to be really hard for policymakers to look at what crime looks like in their own communities and compare it to similar communities,” Kaplan continued.

Overall participation for 2021 remained “below a statistically acceptable level to be nationally representative.” Even still, the lack of data has not stopped the FBI from making claims about crime trends in the United States.

For example, the FBI claimed that “the number of murders reported in the U.S. rose by 4.3%” in 2021. But since so few police departments submitted data, the FBI’s report cannot be considered reliable.

Commenting on the FBI claims, Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said, “The national murder rate increased by much, much less than we saw in 2020. And the national violent crime rate actually slowed.”

The FBI stats may seem like “good news, relative to what we saw in 2020,” according to Ames, but then he added, “The catch is that all of the information the FBI put out is based on estimates.”

A senior official from the Bureau of Justice Statistics told reporters, “We’re certainly not saying it’s a wash. We have all the confidence in the world about these estimations. It’s not that we don’t have confidence in what they’re producing.”

However, he added, “There’s just a certain level of uncertainty around the estimates.”

In a series of tweets, data reporter, Weihua Li, pointed out the highly questionable nature of these estimates and the claims the FBI is attempting to make about crime with them.

Li wrote, “The FBI estimates that New York state’s violent crime rate could be as high as [159 per 100,000 people], or as low as 45 — potentially the lowest violent crime rate in 2021. But the state’s own data shows the violent crime rate is actually about [384 per 100,000 people].”

The reporter asked why the numbers were so different, arguing, “The FBI’s estimate was calculated based on 124 agencies that submitted data to the feds in 2021, covering fewer than four million residents. But New York has 593 law enforcement agencies and ~20 million residents.”

Li went on to say, “Notably, there were more violent crimes in New York City than all non-New York City counties combined. Guess which agency didn’t submit data to the FBI last year? The NYPD.”

With violent crime rising across the country, rosy estimates based on incomplete data have some law enforcement experts concerned.

Jillian Snider, a retired police officer and current policy director for the R Street Institute’s criminal justice and civil liberties team, remarked on this debacle, “The overwhelming lack of law enforcement participation presents a challenge when assessing the true state of nationwide crime in America.”