OMAHA- In July, the Nebraska Crime Commission released its 2021 Crime in Nebraska Report, but Omaha was completely missing. The Omaha Police Department has failed to comply with the FBI's new National Incident-Based Reporting System, which has become the standard for reporting crime data.

Because of this, OPD is unable to submit data to official state and national reports. Prior to the new standard being put in place, crime data reporting consisted of a simple tally of each crime. Now, all departments are required to report the date of the incident, demographic details, location data, drug types and quantities, and whether the crime was gang-related.

Besides Omaha, 18 smaller agencies in Nebraska were unable to submit data for the report, and were considered noncompliant with the new FBI standards. Omaha's lack of reporting accounts for about 60% of Nebraska's crime, so state and federal reports may be inaccurate.

David Van Dyke, OPD's deputy director for technology and reporting services, believes Omaha will be able to comply with the new standards by January. "The challenges that large agencies like the Omaha Police Department face is we've gone from a simplified version of what we have to report to a far more complex version," stated Van Dyke.

Van Dyke also stated that large agencies around the country have had to invest a lot of money to become compliant with the new standards, but he wants to be very careful with how he spends taxpayer money.

Only around 62% of the United States' law enforcement agencies have submitted compliant data, and 39 out of the country's 90 largest police departments have also failed to report sufficient data.

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