New York State Police Transition to National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS)

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. The FY2016 Phase III solicitation furthers the goals of the NCS-X initiative by providing funding to the largest agencies in the NCS-X sample in order to assist these agencies to transition to NIBRS reporting or to develop a comprehensive plan for transitioning to NIBRS reporting via the state pipeline. Specifically, funding under this solicitation targeted the NCS-X sample of agencies with 750 or more sworn officers that are not currently reporting crime data to NIBRS.

The NYSP currently use an RMS (Spectrum Justice System - SJS) that was developed by the New York State UCR Program Office at the Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) in the late 1990s. The NYSP conducted limited testing of a NIBRS transition using SJS and results indicated a negative effect on agencies’ operations; the conclusion of NYSP and DCJS was that the current RMS is too out of date to support their transition to NIBRS. The NYSP plans to replace the SJS with a new COTS RMS for use by the NYSP and more than 200 other local agencies that use the SJS system, with the potential to onboard an additional 300 agencies in New York that do not have a NIBRS compliant RMS (or any RMS). In addition, the NYSP plans to establish 4 regional TA centers and provide on-site technical assistance to its staff.

(CA/NCF)