 It's been two decades since we in law enforcement began to realize the potential for information management offered by computer technology. This potential presented us with new opportunities and challenges. Over the years, demands on our agencies had grown while resources had remained static or even dwindled. With computers, we could envision addressing the demands for information while streamlining our operations. What we needed were computer systems that electronically captured our daily operational data and allowed us to analyze it to assist officers. There was also a growing interest in analyzing that data on a broader scale. Realizing that the Uniform Crime Reports, a 50-year-old cornerstone of crime records, was not adequate for these purposes, the IACP and NSA worked with the FBI to redesign the system. Crime reporting was initially developed as a manual system, but the time had come to update to take advantage of growing computer capabilities. We wanted uniform national crime statistics without labor-intensive monthly tabulations. Many police departments had already developed information systems that recorded sufficient information on each crime to allow them to analyze local crime and draw conclusions that would aid in addressing crime problems. In this changing environment, the FBI developed a national incident-based reporting system or the new UCR. The new system was designed to capture data directly from law enforcement records through automated processes. Reporting agencies would no longer have to complete monthly UCR reports. For those departments that did not already have a basis for crime analysis, this automated system would facilitate that. In addition, the new system would allow analysis of crime on regional, state, and national levels never before possible. As with implementing any program of this magnitude, this change has not been without controversy. Proponents of the new system argue that implementation should occur as rapidly as possible and just as adopted, while some police chiefs fear great expense in creating a Niber's compatible system and collecting the required data. Many of these chiefs feel that their automated systems, while perhaps not meeting Niber's standards, adequately address their department's needs. Being to change these systems, as well as that needed to automate departments that have no automation at all, is not always readily available. Competing priorities and needs are present. Finally, the value versus the cost of having officers in the field gather some data elements is questioned. Agencies revisions of existing systems to meet the minimum requirements of the new UCR assure the availability of valid, uniform crime data nationally. To make this a reasonable expectation, there must be a concerted effort to make funding available to those agencies that need it. We must ensure that the requirements of the system are reasonable, but that there is an openness to change when appropriate. Moreover, we must fully understand and find creative ways to address roadblocks to implementation that police departments and other users encounter. Efforts are underway to accomplish all of these goals. The following video addresses incident-based record systems and their byproduct, the new National UCR. As has always been the case with UCR, the new system should be voluntary in the part of data providers. This is a belief steadfastly maintained by the FBI and its law enforcement advisory groups. That includes the Segers Advisory Policy Board, IACP, NSA, and Major City's chiefs. We also believe that computerized incident-based record systems and crime reporting are the way of the future, and we're looking forward to the greater understanding of crime problems that will come with these new systems and the new UCR. Another crime scene investigation. Interviews are conducted with witnesses. Evidence is secured at the scene, and the investigating officer writes a report. If enough information and evidence are available, the crime is solved, and the offender is arrested and turned over to the court for prosecution. As far as law enforcement is concerned, the story usually ends there, and the officer's report and notes go into a file to be stored indefinitely. This case, like others, is now a statistic to be incorporated into the department's monthly and annual reports. But that ending to the story is changing because of NIVERS, the National Incident-Based Reporting System. The history of NIVERS and crime reporting goes back over six decades. Since the 1930s, documentation of national crime statistics has been an important tool in our efforts to reduce crime. Building on a plan developed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the FBI administered those documentation efforts with the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, or UCR. Support for the UCR program continued to grow with endorsement by the National Sheriff's Association as they established a committee on uniform crime reporting. In the late 1970s, law enforcement called for a thorough review of UCR, with the intent of modernizing it to meet their needs into the next century. Beginning in 1982, a national study was conducted through surveys and discussions with almost 5,000 law enforcement executives. This study helped define the information needs of the law enforcement community. After additional research, a plan was developed to meet these information needs with the establishment of a redesigned reporting system. In 1985, recommendations for the redesign were published in a report titled Blueprint for the Future of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program. Following these design recommendations, the guidelines and design specifications were finalized for an updated, comprehensive crime tracking and reporting system which would become NIVERS. This new system was presented at the National UCR Conference in Orange Beach, Alabama in 1988. With overwhelming consensus, the FBI was urged to pursue national implementation of NIVERS as outlined in the Blueprint. In 1995, implementation was reaffirmed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Major City's Chiefs, the National Sheriff's Association, and the Association of State Uniform Crime Reporting Programs. The FBI fully supports the NIVERS project and encourages participation. With hopes that like traditional UCR, NIVERS will set a new standard in crime data collection. NIVERS and its federal counterpart, FIBERS, are city, county, state, and federal incident-based reporting systems. By incident, we mean a crime and all its components are viewed together as an incident. Under NIVERS, an incident is defined as one or more offenses committed by the same offender or a group of offenders acting in concert at the same time and place. Under the current summary reporting system, crimes are recorded according to a hierarchy rule, meaning in a single incident with multiple offenses, only the highest offense on the hierarchy of offenses is reported. With NIVERS, there is no hierarchy rule. For example, in a rape case also involving motor vehicle theft and kidnapping, all of the offenses would be reported. Also, traditional UCR collects offense information on only eight offenses. NIVERS expands that to 46 separate offenses in 22 crime categories. As with traditional UCR, these categories have standard definitions so that even though some offenses may have various names from state to state, they are reported to the FBI under the same name. For instance, Grand Theft, Petty Larsonie, Felony Larsonie, and Mr. Miener Larsonie all fall under the same definition as Larsonie theft. This keeps NIVERS uniform across the country. Likewise, NIVERS reports standardized details such as age, sex, and race of victims, offenders, and arrestees. Also, property loss and the involvement of drugs or alcohol, even the use of computers, will be recorded about each offense. Again, these details will be the same across the country. Some offenses require revised definitions to be reportable under NIVERS. For example, in NIVERS, the definition of rape allows for the reporting of rapes of both males and females or of victims incapable of giving consent. Under summary, the definition of rape was restricted to only female victims. The NIVERS sex offense definitions include a broad range of criminal activity. New definitions were devised for some offenses, including several often related to sexual offenses against children. My ex-husband was waiting for me in the parking lot. I didn't even know he was there. NIVERS incident reporting gives you a detailed analysis of who the victims are, who the offenders are, and even an insight into why the crimes were committed. He just lost control of himself, I guess. I don't know. In fact, NIVERS has the ability of furnishing information on nearly every major criminal justice issue facing law enforcement today. Terrorism, white-collar crime, weapons offenses, domestic violence, and gangs, to name a few. Because of its ability to produce such detailed, accurate, and meaningful information, NIVERS arms law enforcement with a tool for acquiring the resources it needs to fight crime. It also helps in the efficient and effective use of those resources. Some of the things that I've heard from police departments that submit NIVERS in Connecticut is they never have any reports turned back from the local prosecutors anymore. In Connecticut, you have to pretty much do it right to get through the courts. And they have a lot of case reports, a lot of arrest reports sent back to the police department for correction. Those police departments that are doing NIVERS, they have a very, very, very low rate of return because the NIVERS edits makes you do these things correctly the first time. So I see a big benefit as far as NIVERS just improving the data quality of your overall record keeping. The concept behind NIVERS is not new. Most of the general concepts for collecting, scoring, and reporting UCR data are retained. It's a national application of what is being done locally and is a spin-off from already existing local record systems. The goal of NIVERS is to harness the information already in case files, not to require more information to be collected. The difference between summary and NIVERS reporting is in the degree of details and the fact that NIVERS marks the transition to a modern automated system, a system capable of retrieving crime data directly from law enforcement records. Since these data are more comprehensive, most agencies will have automated law enforcement record systems which will include NIVERS. For local law enforcement agencies, national incident-based reporting means being able to compare their crime conditions with similar jurisdictions. NIVERS is designed to help law enforcement use information collected by officers to report, forecast, and aid in the prevention of future criminal activity. For example, NIVERS information can be analyzed to determine what offenses are being committed at specific hours and locations. This could lead to an early detection of crime trends. Police departments are not proactive. You really look at how we operate, we operate when somebody calls, makes a 911, call, those kind of things. We ought to be taking information. What this information society in the 90s will provide us and say, hey, let's use this information and make it useful for the officer on the street. NIVERS data will also be invaluable to the Attorney General, legislators, and others for formulating national strategy of crime reduction. The FBI's responsibility is to collect, summarize, and analyze data acquired through NIVERS. Reports prepared by the FBI will be distributed as they are today. While an expanded version of crime in the United States will be the primary publication, additional special reports and topical studies useful to law enforcement will also be produced. Since the beginning, NIVERS has raised concerns about increased workload, expense, exposure to critical media commentary, and artificially inflated crime levels. Law enforcement agencies are already overwhelmed by responsibilities which stress their limited staffing and budgets. The fear of some administrators is that under NIVERS, their officers are going to be devoting more time at crime scenes, filling out volumes of paperwork, and subsequently spending less time solving cases. That's a reasonable concern shared not only by executives, but also by officers in the field. The fact is, when NIVERS was created, this concern was foremost in the minds of its designers. As a result, the information requested is generally gathered through preliminary investigations by responding officers. So, NIVERS merely captures electronically more of the information already reported in routine case files. Information such as number of victims and offenders, use of weapons, location, time, and date. Some of are you that investigative officers do not presently collect facts regarding the relationship of victims to offenders. One of the points of information requested under NIVERS for violent crimes. Well, the officer may not be officially reporting that relationship, but you can be sure that it's in its notes, or at least that he knows if they were related, acquaintances, or strangers. NIVERS just asked that all of this information be recorded electronically, and automation should not involve more paperwork. An incident is entered on a central computer system that meets the agency's needs, yet incorporates NIVERS. When more information in a case develops, like arrests, lab data, or recovery of property, it can be entered to update the report. On a monthly basis, the NIVERS information is downloaded and submitted. What we have is an automated dispatching system, and an automated report writing system, so that as soon as we get a call, a dispatcher enters into our system the nature of this call, and who called, and the specifics on that call, and where we're dispatching that officer to. And then when the officer gets on the scene, any information that he wants to add to that record he can. And then later on the officer comes back and completes the report, and they just sit at their little terminals, and they crank out this information, and they just go down the computer screens, and they fill all this information out. They have word perfect, spell check, grammar check, it's just wonderful, and they can write a full report, and then it's filed in the system. And then after the port is approved, et cetera, and the sergeants sign off on it, et cetera, then the NIVERS data completely invisible to the officer is stripped off whatever that officer put into that report. So we don't really discuss NIVERS. We don't discuss what we do call Vibers, the Vermont incident-based reporting system. Most states have a little twist on that. But we don't talk about that. We just essentially say you fill out the reports according to your screen, and then we'll take care of everything else. Police officers, there's a state law that mandates you prepare a family violence report, separate piece of paper. We have a law that makes you fill out a gang-related report, separate piece of paper. And we have another law that makes you fill out a hate-bias crime report, separate piece of paper. And then, of course, you have to fill out your own case report. Well, we've modified NIVERS just this much. We've got, like, a flag that says, hey, is this incident-family violence? Yeah. Yes or no? Check. Is this gang-related? Yes or no? Check. And we've already modified it to include the hate-bias data element. So we take those other three pieces of paper and throw them away now. That saves implementing NIVERS in Connecticut. We can throw out three pieces of paper that police officers have to fill out. So we find that we're looking forward to not having these redundant systems that we have now. And we're also the chiefs of police are getting together. And if there's any other mandates that come out by the legislature, we're not figuring on how to create another piece of paper. But we're trying to figure out how we can perhaps maybe change a code or change a data element that we can include in NIVERS that can collect that information that the legislature and the people in Connecticut want. Because for the most part, all the information people ask for, it's like 90% old information and 5% new. So why fill out another piece of paper when you can add perhaps maybe one additional data element? Another area of concern expressed by agencies is increased expense due to the cost of replacing computer systems. Since the transition to NIVERS is going to be gradual, agencies are not being asked to initiate immediate changes in order to accommodate NIVERS. No agency should consider implementing NIVERS for NIVERS' sake. Rather, as computer systems are routinely renovated, agencies can take the opportunity to incorporate NIVERS into their next upgrade. Technology is moving along so rapidly that it won't take long for NIVERS reporting programs to be worked in as a part of an overall system improvement. Since the transition from the old to the new system will take considerable time, the FBI will continue to collect, process and publish traditional UCR data. Data in the summary format will continue to be collected from agencies not participating in NIVERS. Comparable data will be extracted from the submissions of NIVERS agencies. The result will be a continuation of the traditional statistical time series and a gradual phase-in of the newer forms of statistics made possible by NIVERS. This parallel operation of the old and new system will continue until NIVERS is well established. Exposure to critical commentary by the media is a long-term UCR concern. As a public service, law enforcement is responsible for a full accounting of the administration of their agencies and the status of public safety in their jurisdictions. NIVERS provides better information enabling them to fulfill that responsibility. It heightens an agency's ability to document and easily retrieve information about crime known to law enforcement, leaving less room for speculation. NIVERS also assures consistent reporting from one jurisdiction to another. This availability of accurate, detailed crime data is a benefit to law enforcement. What we're able to provide the press is much, much more detailed information than we ever could. We're able to provide them with real-time information. That is to say, if something happens today and they want to know what's going on in 1996, when we use the old UCR data, it would be like, well, if it's not Labor Day, you'll have to wait because it takes a year to process all that information. Now, because it's all automated, in addition to the fact that there's more of it, we can basically provide that information immediately and it'll be almost be up to date. The theory concerning inflated crime levels is that since NIVERS reports every individual offense in a single incident, it will appear that there has been an increase in criminal activity. While this is a legitimate concern, it is not evident in any operational NIVERS systems, nor are such increases shown in a recent study by the FBI and BJS. NIVERS reporting does not affect the number of incidents. It merely reports the offenses included in a specific incident. For the purpose of crime trend studies, NIVERS is designed so traditional UCR data can be extracted. For example, forcible rape totals from previous years are compared to current forcible rape totals, as opposed to all the reported sex offenses collected by NIVERS. A good summary system should translate into a good NIVERS system. One of the concerns I heard when we looked at it, one of the retaliation if there was one against NIVERS was, you better be careful because your crime total was going to increase. If you had, for example, someone had been murdered and that victim had been raped as well, you reported one crime, the most serious crime being the homicide. Well, your crime level is going to go up and for sheriffs, for mayors, for council members, those kind of things, that may not be information you want to get out. The reality is, police departments are reporting crime the way we always have. I think now you're going to have a truer depiction of what crime really is, what really is occurring, and looking at the aspect of as particularly the folks in Washington look, where do we center money futuristically to deal with problems of domestic violence, more of the issues of handguns, there will be a clear ability to get into a database, look at it, and make it useful. Everything new requires some change, and change is never easy, but the well-planned transition to computerized, incident-based records with NIVERS as a byproduct should be a positive move towards making the most of today's computer capabilities. From accident investigation to crime scene documentation, it's inevitable that law enforcement in the 21st century will involve extensive use of computer systems. Decisions made now are determining whether or not the full benefits of those computer systems will be used by tomorrow's law enforcement administrator and the officers on the street. NIVERS is the future in crime reporting and analysis. One responsibility of today's administrator is to work decisively towards making NIVERS part of their agency's future. The transition is taking place gradually in order to accommodate those agencies not currently ready for change, but the groundwork can be laid now to make that change smooth and efficient. The FBI is committed to the success of NIVERS through technical support, data collection, and effective timely reporting. Ultimately, though, the success of NIVERS depends upon the vision and action of today's law enforcement executives. We did a report the other day about juvenile crime location plus time of day, and they found out a lot of juvenile crime was happening over the noon hour. And this made legislation change to closed campuses, a lot of the bigger fights in school. So I guess the best thing is that we have so much more confidence in our data. I mean, we thought we were reporting accurately before, and now we are certain we are. People like to say that there are two things that are inevitable, death and taxes. But there are two more that are just as certain. The first is that knowledge is power. Power not just in the academic sense, but in the real world business sense. Those that collect and analyze data can interpret it and can use it for their own operations. They also can impact policies and budget decisions. That is why a long time ago, police executives created their own national uniform crime reporting system. Congress supported them and directed the FBI to assist them, and thus the UCR partnership was started. The second certainty is that the information age and the use of computers is here and it will expand. And this is why, in the last several years, police executives, through their organizations like the IACP, the National Sheriffs Association, the major city chiefs, in their partnership with the FBI, promoted and supported the expansion of UCR into an incident-based system. Today and for our future, the effective use of computers and automated information will be an inevitable part of doing any business effectively. We must do this ourselves. But no one will be forced into it. The new UCR, like the old, remains a voluntary system. It will be phased in working with local agencies and the state associations of uniform crime reporting programs, phased in when new or upgraded automation comes on board or when needed resources are obtained. But there is another certainty. Only law enforcement agencies can make this a reality. The UCR program and its upgrade incident-based reporting is our system. We created it and we are its prime users. Armed with this information, we, the local police agencies, will have tactical and operational uses for the data. The information that incident-based UCR provides will help us identify with precision the when, the where, the how and the who of crime in our area, in our region and our country. And we, the local agencies who will be producing this information, will also have a powerful voice to promote the most effective local, state and national strategies to address our crime problems.