Crime Incident Reporting in South Carolina
The initiative of the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) to implement a statewide method of collecting crime incident data for national studies moved South Carolina to the forefront of crime data collection in 1993. After SLED had compiled six years of data by 1998, South Carolina became one of only three states fully compliant with the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
Developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other federal agencies, the purpose of NIBRS was to maintain core data on incidents of crime reported by local and state police departments. Such data collection allowed an investigator to analyze many types of incidents across multiple variables.
For example, one could study locations of crimes involving handguns, analyze the relationships of victims to offenders, or pinpoint areas where specific violent crimes frequently occurred. Such data was essential to understanding the root causes of crime and to allocate resources to best address the problems.
To implement the NIBRS program, SLED received paper copies of individual incident reports from each police department in South Carolina. SLED personnel entered data from the paper reports into the department's mainframe. Because this process was time-consuming and inefficient, the state funded several sites to purchase NIBRS software from private firms to allow electronic transmission of the incident data.
This plan presented several problems, however. The cost estimates were high because more than two hundred local police departments needed not only software, but also hardware. Because NIBRS data had to be recorded in a specific format, training staff to enter the data correctly was an extensive and difficult process.
In addition, the NIBRS program itself caused controversy. Critics on national and state levels contended that NIBRS performed too little informational analysis, suggesting that the system simply archived massive amounts of data and made little use of it.
C.R.I.M.E.S.: A Compliant Software
To address several of these issues, the South Carolina Department of Public Safety (DPS) funded the University of South Carolina Division of Law Enforcement and Safety (USC DLES) from 1993 through 1995 to develop a NIBRS-compliant software-hardware system.
DPS and ASG planned later to distribute this system without charge to other police departments in the state. Such free distribution would save software costs and would hasten the adoption of electronic NIBRS data transmission from all local police departments to SLED. The department also hoped to reduce its data-entry costs.
Using Oracle software and an IBM UNIX computer, USC DLES developed the Criminal Records Information Management and Evaluation System (C.R.I.M.E.S.), a complete NIBRS-compliant system for USC DLES that officers and investigators could access over the USC Internet backbone. Because USC was like a "town" of thirty-thousand students, staff, and faculty, it served as a good mid-sized test environment.
The final NIBRS-compliant incident management system later supported, improved, and maintained by ASG was approved fully by the FBI and SLED. It contained the fifty-two fields required by the FBI, thirty required by SLED, and approximately ninety additional fields needed for local police reporting, dispatching, and management, totaling approximately 172 fields.
System Extensions
Another part of the 1995 through 1996 DPS funding equipped fifteen NIBRS-compliant police departments with hardware and software. ASG supplied the fifteen police departments with improved versions of the NIBRS-compliant software, as well as Gateway Pentium personal computers on which to run the software.
These fifteen sites continued to send data to the SLED computer, enabling SLED to maintain the database for state NIBRS data. Although this pilot project covered only fifteen of the smallest police departments in South Carolina, its deployment laid the groundwork for other sites to purchase personal computers and use the ASG software free of charge.
Studying Crime through Statistics and Maps
To make use of the collected NIBRS data, DPS funded ASG in a separate project to find ways to extract information from the NIBRS data collected by SLED.
ASG downloaded several years of NIBRS data that had been entered at SLED and moved the data into a newly designed Oracle database. ASG's design philosophy was to provide any authorized criminologist with the tools to study crime patterns over time, by location, with easy-to-use interfaces and colored maps and charts, all of which could be created simply by clicking icons and menu choices.
The NIBRS-compliant system was designed to display information in two ways. Using SAS software, the system provided statistical analysis with cross-tab tables and linear regression. Using ARC/INFO software, the system linked geographical imaging to map crimes by location. The user accessed the system via a UNIX workstation attached to the Internet or an equivalent X-Station software system, such as a high-end PC system running Exceed with a high bandwidth connection to the Internet.
The primary shortcoming of the NIBRS data collected by SLED was that the exact address of the crime was not entered, because SLED had not had sufficient funding to perform this additional data entry. The county in which the crime occurred was recorded, however, through the identity of the reporting police department.
To illustrate the importance of exact address data in the system, ASG linked the addresses of convicted persons contained in the South Carolina Court Administration (SCCA) general-sessions docket database to the NIBRS-compliant system. ASG also enabled a mapping feature, so that an investigator could generate maps of the locations where criminals had lived in South Carolina.
The entire system was demonstrated with live access at two Justice Research and Statistics Association meetings, at Atlanta in 1994 and Philadelphia in 1995, and later at a national meeting sponsored by SEARCH, the National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics, at Washington, D.C. in 1996.
NIBRS Crime Book Web System
In a parallel project funded by DPS in 1995 through 1996, ASG included extensions to the NIBRS-compliant system.
First, ASG designed a new method to access the system. Using a web browser and password, a user could connect to the system via the Internet. The user then could access all information, including state crime maps and statistical analysis, without any special hardware or software.
Another development of the NIBRS-compliant system was the inclusion of a map zoom feature, allowing the user to zoom into a county down to the street level to study crime patterns. For example, a user could zoom to a street level in a town or city and see a flag at each site where a convicted person lived. After the user clicked on the flag, the system displayed the court docket with text information. The system potentially could bring up image information about the person, such as a mug shot.
Through 2001, ASG provided:
- All maintenance for CRIS, including hardware, software (UNIX, Oracle, ARC/INFO, SAS, and ASG programs), communications (modems, terminal servers, toll-free data lines, and Internet access), and secure housing with constant power.
- Site visits and audits every three months.
- Training seminars and workshops at USC.
- A toll-free telephone number for users needing help with problems and questions.
- Improvements in the entire system, especially the identification and repair of software bugs.
- User documentation and on-line information on the Web.
ASG also assisted new sites in installing ASG software onto their own hardware.
ASG continued to move NIBRS data from the SLED mainframe to CRIS and maintained the NIBRS database of past incident data. The categories of crimes (e.g., violent crime) were carefully defined so that the values of queries agreed with Crime in South Carolina, an annual report compiled by SLED.
For more information about the C.R.I.M.E.S. software, please contact ASG at info@asg.sc.edu or 803-576-5953.
