The reason is simple. The FBI UCR cooks the books by its definition.
THE UCR (uniform crime report) does not necessarily cook the books, it just does not differentiate which homicides are justified...that way no one actually knows.
Now inaccuracies come from some Departments not filing or not filing on time each year, if required to do so.
The UCR statistics are complied from all City Police Departments and County Sheriff Departments with over a certain population number in the USA. The FBI usually is two to three years before posting the data, since it takes a while to assemble and get accurate statistics, according to what they receive for each year.
And that doesn’t even begin to address the vast number of defensive uses of arms that don’t involve firing the weapon. I have had one of those, and I don’t show up in any statistics - to the contrary, it prevented me from landing there in some manner.
Someone asked me about this just the other day when I posted a story about the murder rate in Detroit being down 24% this year from last year. If the 15 or so justifiable homicides are removed from the 90 murders this year the difference would be noteworthy.
Like a Sheriff detective friend of mine always said, The FBI couldn't follow a menstruating elephant in a snowbank!
srbfl
When the feds are incapable, the first inclination is to come up with a better standard, and try to get individual states to incorporate it.
Importantly, there is some subtlety involved, because states do not want to be thought of as “murder capitals”, so likely at least a dozen red states would have to join in principle before it could work. I say red states, because most of the violence happens in blue states, so they are dead set against honest reporting.
However, when the red states do report accurate numbers, the tremendous jump in the statistics is going to put a lot of pressure on the blue states, who will still have sky high homicide rates, but bottom of the barrel gun self defense numbers.
Great post!