Trends in Juvenile Offending: What You Need to Know

By  Brendan Lantz, and Kyle G. Knapp

The analysis, entitled, Trends in Juvenile Offending: What You Need to Know, focuses on trends in offending from 2016 through 2022 by examining changes in the frequency of juvenile offending by crime type, demographics, and several other characteristics. This study uses incident information from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) from 2016 to 2022. The study period begins in 2016 because of notable increases in agency participation in reporting crime statistics to NIBRS following 2015; it ends in 2022 because that was the most recent year of data available at the time the report was prepared. To produce these data, offense, victim, and offender segment-level information was aggregated to the incident level for each year. The year files were then appended into a master incident-level file, in which incidents were restricted to those (a) involving at least one juvenile offender; and (b) from agencies that reported to NIBRS each month during the study period. From this file, totals were created for each month in every year. Some totals represent the total number of offender participations, while other totals represent the total number of incidents with one or more characteristics of interest. The outline below walks through each segment of NIBRS, how information was aggregated, how cases were dropped, and how totals were generated. 

2024. 20p.