But 40 years later, data collection is still haphazard as policing agencies that protect just 31 percent of the country’s population volunteer to abide by the deeper reporting standards. (An example: There is no national database of police officers’ use of deadly physical force.) Still, the F.B.I. is charging forward, vowing to move fully to its 1980s-era vision by 2021. Only last year did it began collecting data on two new offenses in its fraud category: hacking/computer invasion and identify theft.

“Crime data reporting — in its current state — is not collecting the right information to understand and analyze current events,” Stephen G. Fischer Jr., an F.B.I. spokesman, said. “Today’s information age has changed how we see the world and what the world expects from policing.”

The panel of the National Academy of Sciences is looking past the F.B.I.’s unmet goals — which it sees as one component of a new approach. The panel wants a fresh system for understanding the nature and extent of crime today, said Janet L. Lauritsen, the panel’s chair and a criminology professor at the University of Missouri.

It envisions a format modeled in part, on an international framework organized by the United Nations that would reflect 11 prime categories of crime and 189 sublevels, including many that “are just not even part of the national conversation on crime,” Ms. Lauritsen said. It would, for instance, capture reports from federal agencies, she said, that have never reported crime data to the F.B.I., “even though there is actually a law on the books,” the Uniform Federal Crime Reporting Act, from 1988, that compels it.

Better data fosters transparency, which can build trust with civilians even if it yields statistical crime increases, said Col. Edwin C. Roessler Jr., the police chief in Fairfax County, Va., who is the F.B.I. director’s chairman for converting policing to a new crime classification system. Data offers the evidence to lobby government for more money or better laws, he said. In fact, when Colonel Roessler demonstrated how each gang homicide, on average, required 25 search warrants for “cyberdata, cellphones and other social media,” it helped win financing for a new Cyber Bureau and new “cyberexperts” to work gang cases and build meaningful statistics and intelligence.

“We’ve got gaps here, where we’re not catching the root causes of all kinds of criminal activity,” the colonel said, a flaw with real-life consequences.

So too, for Chief Magnus, in Tucson, who sees the lack of modern-day crime classification as “one of our biggest frustrations.” As he leads a force of 850 officers patrolling 300 square miles, lapses in accurate statistics on property crime, fraud, human trafficking and digital crime hurt his ability to deploy thin resources.

“Once you get into cyberspace,” he said, “data about anything is so limited that it’s really, really hard to figure out even what might be happening locally that impacts that crime.”