Feb 2019 AST Magazine Feb 2019 AST Final Magazine | Page 7

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February 2019 - Edition 32
In 2017, nearly 5.4 million criminal incidents were reported via NIBRS, and 16.3 percent (874,003) of those
incidents involved at least one drug/narcotic offense, totaling 13.9 percent of all NIBRS offenses.
5 Reasons Law Enforcement Agencies
Should be NIBRS Compliant ASAP
Guest OpEd by Bobby Robertson, CEO, Omni- Overall, this new reporting method is
go Software
beneficial as it allows for more thorough
incident reporting through further infor-
By January 1, 2021, all U.S. law en- mation capture and new incident classifi-
forcement agencies will be required cation categories.
to use the National Incident-Based
Reporting System (NIBRS) for col-
lecting and reporting crime-incident
data to the FBI, as the current Uni-
form Crime Reporting (UCR) Pro-
gram will be retiring.
Unlike data reported previously, the NI-
BRS data goes much deeper because of
its ability to include all offenses within
a single incident, plus additional aspects
about each event like location, time of day,
and whether the incident was cleared. 5