Jurisdiction

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Jurisdiction

Created by Russ Hartle, Modified on Tue, 27 May, 2025 at 11:12 AM by Russ Hartle

The purpose of establishing appropriate jurisdiction is to depict the nature and amount of crime in a particular community. Throughout the United States, there are thousands of LEAs; some have overlapping jurisdictions. To ensure LEAs with overlapping jurisdictions are not reporting duplicate data (offense or arrest), the FBI UCR Program developed the following guidelines:

Local, county, state, tribal, and federal LEAs should report offenses that occur within their jurisdictions.
When two or more local, county, state, tribal, or federal LEAs are involved in the investigation of the same offense, the agency with investigative jurisdiction based on local, county, state, tribal, and federal law and/or applicable interagency agreements or memorandums of understanding should report the offense. If there is uncertainty as to the lead or primary agency, the agencies must agree on which agency should report the offense.
LEAs will report only those arrests made for offenses committed within their own jurisdictions.
The recovery of property should be reported only by the LEA who first reported it missing and/or stolen regardless of which agency recovered it.

As a rule, cities having their own police departments report their own crime data. However, smaller locales may combine their crime data with larger agencies (e.g., sheriffs’ offices and state police) for reporting purposes. This practice most often occurs in rural or unincorporated areas employing constables, town marshals, or other officers who infrequently report offenses. In cases where the county sheriff or state police has a contract to provide law enforcement services for an incorporated city, the sheriff or state police will continue to report incidents occurring within the boundaries of these cities. These reports should reflect the geographic location of where the incident occurred by use of the city’s Originating Agency Identifier (ORI). In some localities, the sheriff, state police, or a federal LEA will assist a local police department in the investigation of crimes committed within the limits of the city. Even though this is the case, the city policedepartment should report the offenses unless there is a written or oral agreement specifying otherwise.

Referrals From Other Agencies

If a reporting agency refers the investigation of an incident to another local, state, or federal agency after submitting the data to the FBI UCR Program, the original reporting agency must delete its report. The agency receiving the referral would then report the incident as if it were an original submission.

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