Fayetteville Police Department’s NIBRS Transition Process

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 the transition to NIBRS reporting.

The Fayetteville Police Department has 433 sworn officers and 160 civilian employees. The City of Fayetteville is the sixth-largest municipality in the state, covers approximately 145 square miles within Cumberland County, and serves an estimated population of 210,470 residents. Fayetteville PD’s current record management system (RMS) can be upgraded to be NIBRS-compliant at no cost from the RMS vendor. To identify other additional technical costs associated with transition, the Fayetteville Police Department completed a workload analysis. This analysis determined the need for additional hardware and technical assistance to support the NIBRS transition.

Funds are requested for the acquisition of hardware and for contract personnel identified in the workload analysis as necessary for the transition to an upgraded RMS. Hardware includes servers for local maintenance of the crime incident data and laptops for use in testing and validating records submitted from the field to the RMS. A contract IT specialist will address technical issues associated with integrating other critical systems with the RMS.

(CA/NCF)