Cumberland County Sheriff's Office NIBRS Implementation Assistance

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.

Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) in NC is a medium sized agency with 338 sworn officers and a county population of approximately 300,000 residents. The agency uses a records management system (RMS) provided by Superion; this vendor has experience transitioning agencies to NIBRS. The RMS collects most NIBRS data elements already and will require minimal upgrades. The agency’s more pressing need is to fund 30 MDTs so that deputies can enter the data electronically rather than taking reports by hand. This will facilitate the necessary NIBRS edit checks and imposition of conditional data edits during data entry, which will improve data quality and completeness. CCSO has already purchased some MDTs; thus the request to purchase 30 is only for a subset of the agency’s vehicles. Deputies that do not have MDTs still take reports by hand, which must then be entered manually into the RMS. The application requests funding to purchase 30 MDTs, upgraded RMS software, and mobile wifi capability so that the MDTs can transmit incident data from the field.

(CA/NCF)