Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement & Criminal Justice,
Louisiana Sheriff's Association

Project: LIBRS

The Louisiana Incident-Based Reporting System (LIBRS) is a key statewide system for the Louisiana law enforcement community that required superior project management skills to develop and implement.

The system collects criminal incident data from approximately 400 law enforcement agencies throughout Louisiana, ranging from sheriff departments to police departments and university campus police. It was developed on an IBM RS/6000-based system running AIX, with Informix as the relational database management system, and using Informix-4GL and Microsoft VisualStudio for program development.

LIBRS replaces a manual system for reporting crime statistics to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that has been used by law enforcement agencies for many years. In the past, each law enforcement agency has compiled summary statistics on crime in their jurisdiction, then forwarded the summarized data to the FBI for inclusion in the national Crime in the U.S. report.

The new system collects actual incident reports filed by police officers when a crime (murder, robbery, drug violation) is reported. This data is collected at each individual site and then transmitted (usually via the internet) to the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association.. A series of procedures follow to verify the correctness of the data before it is placed in the LIBRS relational database. Before it is inserted into the database, every data element is checked, using the LIBRS edit program, which was written in Informix 4GL language. Data from this database will form the basis for the annual Crime in Louisiana report. The Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement analysts for research and Legislative reports will also use it.

Monthly, data from the LIBRS database is extracted, re-formatted into flat files and sent to the FBI where it is edited for correctness. Any incidents with errors are returned to Louisiana, where a detailed procedure has been established to identify the source of the error and correct it. The FBI mandates a maximum of 4 percent error-rate, but the LIBRS system has consistently met a 2 percent error-rate.

From developing systems to coordinating data exchanges between nearly 400 Louisiana law enforcement agencies, the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association Data Center, the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice and the FBI presented a challenge that was more than met by using our Project Management Methodology. It is an example of the type of complex system we are capable of developing using our approach.