Rockland Police Department's NCS-X Implementation

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 6,600 agencies that reported to NIBRS as of 2015, 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 FY2017 Phase VI solicitation furthers the goals of the NCS-X initiative by providing funding to small and medium sized 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 fewer than 750 or more sworn officers that are (1) are located in states in which the state UCR Programs currently have or will have by October 2017 a state IBR standard; (2) currently do not report incident-based data to their state UCR Program or to the FBI’s NIBRS; (3) have not previously received funding to transition to IBR/NIBRS; and (4) are not already in the process of transitioning to IBR/NIBRS.

The Rockland Police Department (RPD) will expand NIBRS reporting by obtaining software and hardware to upgrade their Records Management System (RMS) in order to collect NIBRS compliant incident-based data. In addition, RPD add analytics to their RMS. RPD will obtain certification to report NIBRS compliant data and submit NIBRS data to the Maine UCR program as a final project deliverable.

(CA/NCF)