Definition of Error Code 173 from the 2019 NIBRS Technical Specification 1.0 from March 30, 2018
| Data Element 3 | A Group “A” Incident Report was submitted with Data Element 3 (Incident Date/Hour) containing a date that occurred before the agency converted over to NIBRS. Because of this, the record was rejected. | 173 |
| Data Element 5 | (Exceptional Clearance Date) cannot contain a date earlier than the date the LEA began submitting data via the NIBRS. | 173 |
See 2019 NIBRS Technical Specification for more information.
Implementation of this Edit in Crime Insight Repository
The logic on this error has changed over time because the way the FBI collects data has changed over time. In the spec from the early 2000's, the FBI had the concept of a Time Window. This meant that strictly speaking an agency wasn't supposed to submit any data that was more than 2 years old.
Back then, in the case where there is new data for an old incident, the agency could submit a single segment (arrestee, recovered property or exceptional clearance) and this segment would contain additional fields describing the nature of the incident being updated. This same approach could be used for new information for incidents that took place prior to when the agency started reporting NIBRS. They could submit a "pre-NIBRS" segment, which was a single-segment update for an incident that doesn't exist at all. Inside Crime Insight we refer to these segments as "orphans" because they contain only a piece of an incident.
In the last 3-4 versions of the FBI spec (from v1.1 forward), they have moved away from the logic of Time Windows, now accepting that they have a live database of all incidents over all time. In addition, bandwidth is a much lower level concern than it was when this was all invented in the 1980's. So, for completeness, the FBI moved towards accepting updates for complete incidents rather than just the bits that changed.
But this left a hole in the logic -- what could they do when new information is available for an incident prior to the NIBRS start date? The answer is that they changed the logic for error 173, allowing the agency to submit a complete incident, including both the old information (prior to NIBRS start date) and the new information (e.g. arrest). The logic for error 173 is now as follows:
If ALL dates in the incident (incident date, arrest dates, exceptional clearance date, recovered property dates) are prior to the NIBRS start date, then error 173 is generated; if ANY date in the incident is after the NIBRS start date, the incident is accepted.
This was discussed by the FBI at the ASUCRP conference in 2017, in response to a question raised by an RMS vendor. At the time, they indicated that these incidents would not affect crime counts from when the agency was reporting Summary because they go into a special bucket. However, the arrests will be counted.
In Crime Insight, we implemented this by using the logic that if there is a NIBRS incident in a month when we have Summary data, the NIBRS data is ignored. For agencies that didn't previously report, we do not have any special logic that would stop the incident from being counted.