Developments in NIBRS

As law enforcement agencies change from the Summary reporting system to NIBRS, they have called upon many vendors to develop incident-based systems that comply with the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program standards yet accommodate their agency’s unique requirements. In laying the foundation for NIBRS, the FBI published a series of documents to assist agencies and vendors in building successful records management systems. As NIBRS continues to evolve, the FBI keeps agencies up to date through periodically disseminating UCR State Program Bulletins. To help all vendors and other interested parties keep abreast of the most current information concerning NIBRS, the FBI has extracted pertinent information from UCR State Program Bulletins and is providing it in this document, which will be updated as needed.

This document contains a synopsis of each of the NIBRS publications, some of which are maintained on the FBI’s UCR Web page. Other NIBRS documents are available upon request from the UCR Program. This document contains excerpts from UCR State Program Bulletins that provide a historical perspective of the evolution of NIBRS including procedural changes, reporting clarifications, and policy additions that have occurred from 1999 to December 2008.

Note: The excerpts are presented as they were originally published in the UCR State Program Bulletin and therefore will include any additions, deletions, or clarifications released in subsequent Bulletins. Readers are urged to read this document in its entirety before making any programming changes.