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 FY 2017 Texas Conversion to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) grant in the amount of $608,588.32. The grant period is September 1, 2016 to May 31, 2018, and does not require the City to make a cash-match or in-kind contribution.
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 records management system is not equipped to collect and report crime incident data in the NIBRS format. This grant will fund HPD to hire a vendor to convert its records management system from UCR to NIBRS. The grant will be utilized for the software development and the modifications to upgrade the existing infrastructure.