State of Hawaii NIBRS Program Expansion

The State Justice Statistics (SJS) Program is designed to maintain and enhance each state's capacity to address criminal justice issues through collection and analysis of data. The SJS Program provides support to each state to coordinate and conduct statistical activities within the state, conduct research to estimate impacts of legislative and policy changes, and serve as a liaison in assisting BJS to gather data from respondent agencies within their states.

The State of Hawaii’s Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) is located in the Research & Statistics Branch, Crime Prevention & Justice Assistance Division, of the Department of the Attorney General. The Research & Statistics Branch is Hawaii’s primary source of data, analyses, and other objective information on the nature and extent of crime in Hawaii. Branch publications such as the annual “Crime in Hawaii Uniform Crime Report” and a wide variety of specialized crime-related studies provide critical, comprehensive data and analyses to the criminal justice community, academic institutions, and the general public. Staff also provide technical assistance to other criminal justice agencies and serve on several crime-related committees. The SAC Director, who is also the Chief of Research & Statistics, has directed Branch activities since 1996.

Under this award, the SAC will conduct activities under the following Core Capacity area: Increasing access to statistical data. To facilitate the submission of data from Honolulu’s Police Department (HPD), the NCS-X project funded CPJAD (Hawaii’s Crime Prevention and Justice Assistance Division), through its state Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, to build the capacity for the state to report NIBRS (National Incident-Based Reporting System) criminal incident data from local police agencies to the FBI. HPD’s NIBRS data and operations were certified by the FBI effective January 1, 2018, at which point HPD began reporting data directly to the FBI while the state UCR program’s data repository was under development. The state repository was subsequently FBI-certified in February 2019. On March 31, 2020, the state UCR program attained the primary goal of the NCS-X project by successfully receiving, verifying, and submitting crime data from HPD to the FBI for crime incidents reported in January 2020.

The proposed project will expand Hawaii’s capacity to collect, manage, analyze, and report on incident-based crime data. The SAC, which also serves as Hawaii’s federally-designated state UCR program, will use project funds to: 1) provide technical assistance to Hawaii’s county police departments to the extent necessary for each agency to report certified data to the state program’s data repository; 2) enhance and expand the repository’s analytical and reporting tools; and, 3) implement a program sustainability plan and other operational enhancements. Funding is also being requested for in-state travel costs and travel expenses to attend a conference focused on the FBI’s NIBRS program.

(CA/NCF)