Numbers

 My weekend has started. Just in time too! I left work Thursday with my brain swimming in numbers. The new software is not made for the old UCR report. (UCR = monthly crime stats sent off to the OSBI/FBI.) The new software is based on IBRS, an updated version of UCR. IBRS is diffently a better system to track accurate crimes that happen each month than UCR ever was! OSBI expects our Department to turn in the old UCR until we can turn in 3 consecutive months of IBRS reports with less than a 2 percent error rate. I was thinking no problem. We will just print off reports from the new system and transfer it into UCR. How I wish it had been that easy. My co-worker spent the better part of 2 days working on it before he threw in the towel. He just could not get everything to balance. Not his fault. He put the numbers that he got from the reports ran from the new system. Problem is the new system did not give good numbers for UCR.


The biggest problem is that UCR will only let you score one crime for each incedent.

So if you break into your old girlfriends house and steal stuff (Burglary), beat the ever livin snot out of her (Aggravated Assault), and steal her car (Auto Theft) you only get to pick one of these crimes to report to the OSBI/FBI. Yep, just one. And you do not get to pick the one you think is the worst, you have to take the one that OSBI says is the highest scoreable offense. So the only crime reported for this incident would be the aggravated assault.

None of the property will be scored as stolen that was taken while he rummaged through her house after he knocked her out. Not the laptop computer or her cell phone or her money, not even the car he stole. Now don't get confused and think we did not take a report documenting all of that crime. A report was sent to the DA's Office with all the charges. The DA will get to decide what they will charge the old boyfriend with. This UCR report is just the stats that get turned in. This is what "they" base a city or areas crime stats on. UCR is not an accurate count of crimes committed in an area. It is old and outdated and I look forward to getting rid of it.

But first I will need to learn how to do IBRS better.

Until we all learn how to do IBRS right we get to keep doing UCR. Since the new system will not give accurate reports for UCR I had to break out the old hand written way. Now I have this tendency to forget things that I don't make use of regularly. So I was more than a little bit out of practice. I haven't done the hand written form of the report since my brilliant co-worker coded the old software to count every bean and do almost every bit of UCR automatically.

I was able to figure out how to get a report out of the new system that showed every reportable crime that happened for the month. It took me half the day to get all the data written down. Then it took me the other half the day to get everything to balance. I finished it with 10 min to go before the end of my day. It shouldn't have taken me that long but I was out of practice. It wouldn't have taken as long to balance if I didn't make those 5-6 errors that had to be tracked down. It would have been much easier to add all of the columns if I hadn't gotten rid of the 10 key calculator. Plugging in over $53,000.00 dollars worth of stolen items in three different ways, and making sure they all balanced, on the computer's calculator added a bit more to my headache. But it is done. Done on time too. It has to be done by the 7th and that was Thursday's date. When I walked out the door my co-worker was filling out the last of the forms that all those stats get turned in on. He will have taken them to the Chief to sign and out the door they can go.

Now when I get back to work next week I only have to worry about figuring out how to do last month's IBRS, the daily log from over the weekend, the arrest log for the previous week, and at some point we need to figure out a solid practice for checking in all of those supplemental reports that have been piling up for almost 4 weeks, the new alarm procedures that have been left unattended for the last month, and punch list of items that need to be fixed with the new system for the meeting on Tuesday with the programmer. It may not sound like it but this week was easier than the last few have been.

My desk is buried in papers. I need to get some of it cleaned up or I am going to run out of room to work on anything else.

I want to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Even if it is just a group of my co-workers standing at the other end of the hall with their flashlights on.