The crime report is an essential tool for recording all of the important details of a police encounter. This includes the victim, the perpetrator, the date, time and location of the incident. Additionally, a crime report contains a narrative and a detailed description of the events. It can also include a map and pictures of the scene.
While report writing may seem like a mundane task that takes officers away from their job duties, it is a crucial process for maintaining accountability throughout the justice system. The FBI uses Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) to collect data on all incidents, arrests and criminal offenses committed by law enforcement agencies nationwide. However, UCR requires that offenses be classified and only the most serious offense within an incident be counted for reporting purposes.
As a result, UCR-only crime statistics have limitations and provide a limited view of crime. NIBRS will replace UCR by 2021 and is designed to capture more detail on each single incident, including offender and victim information. This will allow for a more accurate and complete picture of crime in the United States.
The crime report is not going anywhere, but there is new technology that can make the process a little easier. For example, Draft One analyzes body-worn camera transcripts and automatically drafts a narrative for a report. This solution can save an officer up to an hour of report writing each shift and has been shown to outperform officer-drafted narratives in terms of terminology and coherence.