The Houston Police Department requests approval for submission and acceptance of its application to the Office of the Texas Governor Criminal Justice Division (CJD) for the FY2019 Texas Conversion to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) grant in the amount of $2,186,800. The grant period is June 1, 2018 through April 30, 2019, and does not require the City to make a cash-match or in-kind contribution. This grant provides funds to assist law enforcement agencies in upgrading or replacing their technology infrastructure to begin reporting crime to the National Incident Based Reporting System by September 2019 per federal mandate.
HPD’s records management system currently collects and provides crime data to the Federal Bureau of Investigation via a nationwide program - the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). The UCR provides the FBI with the number of known index crimes, number of crime cases cleared, and crimes reported to HPD.
NIBRS (National Incident Based Reporting System) is an incident-based reporting system also used by law enforcement agencies for collecting and reporting crime incident data to the FBI. NIBRS provides a more detailed crime report compared to UCR. UCR and NIBRS are both regulated by the FBI, and over 90% of law enforcement agencies nationwide report crime data to the FBI using either UCR or NIBRS, which makes it difficult to compare crime statistics nationwide.
HPD’s current records management system is not equipped to collect and report crime incident data in the NIBRS format. This grant will fund the purchase of newer application software and hardware needed to meet the federal reporting requirements, expeditious data entry, and compilation and storage of data required by NIBRS. Reporting will be enhanced with this upgrade by reducing human intervention/errors upon data entry and validation, and providing automated and enhanced interfaces with other federal, state and local law enforcement systems.