NCS-X
NCS-X News
The NIBRS Service Toolset is available from SEARCH, the National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics. As a part of NCS-X, SEARCH developed the tool to allow law enforcement agencies to test their IBR data submissions against the NIBRS requirements and address any errors before beginning the NIBRS certification process.
What is NCS-X?
The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), in partnership with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) Division, is leading the NCS-X program, which is designed to produce nationally-representative incident-based data on crimes reported to law enforcement agencies. The NCS-X program recruits 400 law enforcement agencies to provide incident-based data to the state or federal IBRS data collection program. When the data from these 400 agencies are combined with the data from the more than 6,600 agencies currently reporting NIBRS data, the FBI will be able to produce national estimates of crime that can be disaggregated by a range of characteristics including victim-offender characteristics, the attributes of the event, and victim-offender relationship.
NCS-X is designed to implement an efficient and minimally burdensome process allowing local and state agencies to collect and extract incident-based data from existing records management systems. When the NCS-X project is completed, nationally representative NIBRS data will be available for analysis, enhancing the ability to monitor, respond to, and prevent crime. The main component of this project is to provide technical assistance and funding to the 400 selected law enforcement agencies and to support Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) programs to enable them to report incident-based crime data to the FBI. The team of partner organizations that provides this vital TA services includes RTI International, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), the Integrated Justice Information Systems (IJIS) Institute, and the National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics (SEARCH).
NCS-X Sample
The NCS-X sample of 400 law enforcement agencies (LEAs) is a stratified random sample of 12, based on the government type of LEAs (i.e., state, county or township, municipal, or tribal) and the number of sworn officers. The sample of 400 agencies was drawn from the agencies not reporting NIBRS data for 2011 and stratified based on agency type and agency-level sworn officer counts.
| NCS-X sample strata by size and type of agency. | ||
| Stratum | Agency Type | #of Agencies |
| 1 | Agencies Reporting NIBRS in 2011 | 5,880 |
| AGENCIES NOT REPORTING NIBRS IN 2011 | ||
| 2 | Agencies with 750 officers or more (any agency type) | 72 |
| 3 | State agencies with 1-749 officers | 12 |
| 4 | State or municipal agencies with official officer count of zero | 2 |
| 5 | County or township agencies with 36-749 officers | 72 |
| 6 | County or township agencies with 0-35 officers | 22 |
| 7 | Municipal agencies with 181-749 officers | 48 |
| 8 | Municipal agencies with 61-180 officers | 40 |
| 9 | Municipal agencies with 16-60 officers | 47 |
| 10 | Municipal agencies with 1-15 officers | 71 |
| 11 | Remaining nontribal agencies (any type and size) | 5 |
| 12 | Tribal agencies | 9 |
NCS-X Status in the States
As of June 2017, the NCS-X Initiative has successfully convened grant projects with all but four eligible states' UCR Programs (i.e., Alaska, Arizona, Mississippi, and New Mexico; Mississippi does not currently have a state-level UCR Program). In addition, approximately half of the largest LE agencies in the sample (those with 750 or more sworn officers) have been recruited. They are actively working on their transition to NIBRS reporting, including 17 agencies that received direct NCS-X funding in FY2016.
NCS-X Resources
Please see the following materials for more information on NCS-X:
NCS-X: Building a System of National Crime Statistics for the 21st Century