News Releases

MCP Transitions to New Crime Data Reporting System

For Immediate Release: Tuesday, August 22, 2017

The Montgomery County Police Department (MCPD) is changing its crime measurement and data reporting to the federal government. Earlier this year, the MCPD began reporting details about its individual crime incidents in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Through last year, MCPD reported its crime data following the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Summary guidelines, where only total counts of specific incident classifications are reported.

NIBRS provides a higher level of detail on crime than the current UCR Summary system, which has been in use since 1929. There are approximately 6,600 law enforcement agencies in the United States currently reporting under NIBRS. The FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) have jointly funded 21 large police agencies and multiple states to support transitions to the new crime data collection system through the National Crime Statistics Exchange (NCS-X) program. It is part of a broader effort endorsed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to have all law enforcement agencies across the nation report NIBRS data by 2021.

In 2016, the Maryland State Police was awarded a grant under NCS-X, to plan its transition so that it may expand its capacity to collect detailed incident-based crime statistics from all Maryland agencies. The NCS-X project is intended to create a NIBRS national representative crime sample that includes many of the police departments serving the largest populations, such as Montgomery County.

NIBRS is designed to provide a more complete picture of crime and how it influences U.S. jurisdictions both urban and rural. The system covers a broad range of offenses and provides information on victim and offender characteristics, the relationship between victims and offenders, weapon use, victim injury, location, time of day, and arrest outcomes. It also increases police transparency and accountability in reporting and counting crime, serving as a single national standard for incident reporting.

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Release ID: 17-258
Media Contact: mcpnews 
Categories: uncategorized