SIBRS Server Upgrade

The National Crime Statistics Exchange (NCS-X) is an effort to expand the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) into a nationally representative system of incident-based crime statistics. BJS and the FBI are implementing NCS-X with the support of other Department of Justice agencies, including the Office for Victims of Crime. The goal of NCS-X is to enroll a sample of 400 scientifically selected law enforcement agencies to submit data to NIBRS; when these 400 new NIBRS-reporting agencies are combined with the more than 6,300 agencies that reported to NIBRS as of 2013, the nation will have a nationally representative system of incident-based crime statistics drawn from the operational data systems of local police departments. These incident-based data will draw upon the attributes and circumstances of criminal incidents and allow for more detailed and transparent descriptions of crime in communities. The current mechanism by which local law enforcement (LE) agencies report data to the FBI’s NIBRS, in general, is for local LE agencies to submit data to their state UCR reporting program, and then for the state UCR program to report those data to the FBI. While the FBI does accept NIBRS data directly from a small number of law enforcement agencies, the highly preferred route of reporting is through the state UCR program. Funding from 2016 National Crime Statistics Exchange (NCS-X) Implementation Assistance Program will help states to expand their current capacity to report incident-based crime data to the FBI’s NIBRS. The plan to transition local agencies to NIBRS reporting requires enhancing the “state pipeline” in order to ensure that each state’s Uniform Crime Reporting program is capable of receiving and processing local incident-based crime data. For states with a NIBRS component but have less than 80% reporting, the primary goal of this funding is to help the state program expand their capacity to receive and process additional IBR data and begin reporting NIBRS data from at least one agency from the NCS-X sample. Funding will also support state programs to conduct readiness assessments with sampled agencies with the state.

OklahomaÂ’s state UCR program is NIBRS-certified. The state currently has 335 UCR-reporting agencies, of which 15% (35 agencies) are still reporting in summary format. Most of these 35 agencies are larger agencies; collectively, they cover 58% of the stateÂ’s population. This list of 35 agencies that still report summary data to the state program includes the Oklahoma City Police Department (OCPD), one of the largest agencies in the U.S. and one of the police departments included in the NCS-X certainty stratum of the 72 largest agencies. The addition of OCPD and three other NCS-X sample agencies, as well as other non-sample agencies that are planning to transition, is expected to more than double the volume of crime data submitted to the state UCR program.

Currently, Oklahoma has a system where the SIBRS database that houses all of the states IBR data is on a separate server that is almost five years old. The RMS/SIBRS application is on a three-year old server that is shared with other programs and applications. Neither server is capable of processing the additional volume of incident-based crime data that will flow from the 35 agencies that the state is in the process of transitioning from summary to NIBRS reporting due to insufficient data processing speed and memory capacity. The goal of this project is to upgrade the stateÂ’s server and online RMS application prior to the stateÂ’s NCS-X sample agenciesÂ’ transition to NIBRS reporting. This will expand the stateÂ’s capacity to receive and process the additional volume of IBR data that is expected when additional agencies begin submitting IBR data to the state.
(CA/NCF)