National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) Implementation for San Francisco Police Department

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 currently report to NIBRS, 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 FY2018 solicitation furthers the goals of the NCS-X initiative by providing funding to the remaining states and local agencies in the NCS-X sample in order to assist them in their transition to NIBRS reporting. SFPD has a home-grown RMS, called Crime Data Warehouse (CDW), that feeds into 40 other partner agencies. For example, arrests alone are updated nightly to 10 different systems. CDW is not currently NIBRS compliant: it misses expected IBR offense codes, response categories, as well as edit rules & validations. Using funds provided under this award, SFPD will perform an extensive business analysis to determine how to convert its 2,000 incident codes (in CDW) into the Offense Codes used by NIBRS. They will then integrate the NIBRS data with the functioning of the rest of SFPD’s system, and with all of its partner agencies to become NIBRS compliant.

CA/NCF