Increasing and Enhancing Hate Crime and Incident-Based Crime Data Reporting by Law Enforcement Agencies

Statistical analysis of any data set exponentially suffers due to incomplete or inconsistent data collection methodologies.  In turn, the current U.S. national crime data set is missing important criminal offense, arrest, and victimization data from approximately 6,000 active law enforcement agencies (LEAs) for 2023.  Due to technical and financial struggles to meet the current National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data collection format standard, this gap in agency participation is directly related to the approximately 7,000 LEAs that failed to report any hate crime information to the FBI in 2021 – a 21.8% decrease from the rate of participating LEAs just one year prior.

To plug these gaps and raise the national NIBRS participation rates and total population covered by NIBRS-reporting jurisdictions, Applicant Full Circle Training Solutions proposes to implement a Rapid Deployment Model for targeting a select number of states and records management system (RMS) service providers, then transitioning intra- or interstate groups of LEAs to NIBRS certification in bulk.  Pursuant to the provisions of the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE ACT (34 U.S.C. §30507), allocated federal funds will be used to negotiate cost-effective procurement contracts to obtain or update a targeted law enforcement agency’s RMS software product.  Additionally, strict participation agreements executed by the RMS service providers will contain payment milestones that require their client LEAs to achieve state and FBI incident-based reporting certification within 2 years.

Full Circle Training Solutions will continually assess the geographical, technical, and financial patterns encompassing the remaining batch of non-NIBRS LEAs.  With a staff of experienced NIBRS trainers, auditors, curriculum designers, and law enforcement business process analysts, Full Circle Training Solutions will submit monthly reports containing empirical findings and recommendations to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Overall, the increase in the number of incident-based reporting LEAs, when coupled with readily accessible bias motivation and hate crime coding training options for law enforcement personnel, will immediately increase the volume of general crime and hate crime-specific data submitted nationwide. While the targeted LEAs and their state UCR programs will be direct beneficiaries of the project, the Bureau of Justice Statistics will benefit from both a growing crop of newly trained crime data collection and reporting professionals, as well as the resulting robust, granular crime data at the municipal, county, state, federal, tribal, and campus-levels.