In accordance with mandatory federal data collection standards, the Charles County Sheriff’s Office, along with police departments across the country, has begun implementing the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). With a mandatory start date of January 1, 2021, law enforcement agencies, nationwide, began transitioning from the Summary Reporting System (SRS) under the Unified Crime Reporting (UCR) to NIBRS, which offers significant improvements in statistical data collection, offense classification, and crime incident management.
Although the UCR has served our nation for many decades, NIBRS is a more modern system with a number of advantages. The most significant difference between NIBRS and the traditional UCR System is the degree of detail in reporting. NIBRS is more comprehensive and detailed.
Unlike data reported through the UCR Program’s traditional SRS—, which is an aggregate monthly tally of crimes and counts only one offense per incident—NIBRS delves much deeper into each incident to provide information about the circumstances and context of crimes, such as location, time of day, and whether the incident was cleared.
NIBRS captures more details on victims, known offenders, relationships between victims and offenders, arrestees, property, and drugs involved in crimes. The additional detailed crime data are captured in a standardized format, which provides greater analytic ability and makes NIBRS a more thorough crime-reporting standard.
NIBRS counts 58 categories of offenses compared to the 10 categories of offenses UCR gathers. The more expansive list includes offenses such as extortion and kidnapping, as well as many other common or serious offenses not included in UCR.
The data submitted represents when an incident was reported to the CCSO and does not include municipalities or the Maryland State Police.
For additional details about how crime data is collected nationally, click on the FBI link at https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/.
To find crime data relating to Charles County, click on this link: https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/explorer/agency/MD0090000/crime
For information relating to how transitioning from UCR to NIBRS effects crime stats, please refer to this article: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/encs.pdf
