National incident based reporting system - Essay Example

This paper identifies the current challenges of crime reporting as the lack of harmonization on the usage of crime reporting programs used in various states in U.S. It is important to note that some cities have failed to incorporate NIBRS into their crime prevention and detection system. It also addresses the technological opportunity presented by NIBRS in crime reporting technology and its advantages over the UCR. The paper makes some basic recommendation for effective crime reporting system.

First, it recommend the need to involve the community and ordinary citizens in the system since they are the one affected by crime and it might be more effective if they know exactly the significance of correctly reporting a crime incident. Secondly, it calls for the crime reporting system to be more alert so as to adapt to the changing society so as to capture immerging new forms of crimes in our society. A crime is an act that violates a political or moral rule. Presently, an act that was considered a crime some years back might no longer be a crime in today's society.

It is also true that what a certain community considers to be an antisocial act might mean nothing to another community. Statistical crime rate will directly be affected as culture and political environment changes. This in turn determines the allocation of resources for the enforcement of such laws and also influences public opinion. Public perception of a crime is affected if there are changes in the way the crime data are collected. (Hart, 1961)Law enforcing agencies before used to employ awkward way of crime reporting to know whether crime is increasing or not such as counting the number of people in the people and this made crime data analysis very difficult.

Until early 18th century, the data collection on crime incidences was insignificant. (Blythe, 1992)The governments of all nations all over the world have been looking forward to minimizing the occurrence of crime in the society. The incidences of crimes are usually identified by location, gender, nature and race by these crime reporting programs. This has really helped the government in allocating resources by allocating more resources in the areas more prone to crimes to reduce them.The crime incidences reporting have helped the Federal state to plan and redirect resources in fighting crimes since the UCR began its operations according to the data collected by USA government.

According to the FBI (2006), there is an overall reduction in crime incidences ranging from violent to simple assaults for the past ten years.Statement of the problemMany crimes that happen every day goes unreported in the UCR crime reporting program. NIBRS in the other hand, as an improvement of UCR, has its own limitations.One, there is no enough resources needed to capture all the crime incidences. This in turn has lead to its failure in giving a proper picture of crime to the law enforcement agencies for it to strategies effective ways of fighting crimes.

This has been contributed by failure of some cities to introduce the NIBRS in their systems and lack of harmonization in crime prevention system strategies and partnership between cities.This paper is an effort to address