Some $24.2 million in federal grants have been awarded to law enforcement agencies through the National Crime Statistics Exchange (NCS-X) initiative to support infrastructure for national and consistent crime reporting, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced. The NCS-X program is funded by the FBI and administered by BJS. A total of $18.7 million will support the transition of 16 of the largest local law enforcement agencies to their states’ incident-based crime reporting systems. This state-level crime data will be shared with the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which DOJ said “will allow for greater transparency and accountability among police agencies.”
“NCS-X awards mark a substantive investment by the Department of Justice in the crime-reporting infrastructure used by law enforcement agencies throughout the nation,” said Jeri Mulrow, BJS acting director. Through the NCS-X program, BJS is recruiting 400 more law enforcement agencies to add to the 6,600 that now report to NIBRS. The NIBRS program has been under way for years, but only a minority of police departments report data to it.