LV not included in FBI crime statistics

For the first time in nearly a decade, Las Vegas will not be included in national crime statistics compiled each year by the FBI and released annually, according to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.

A spokesman for the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Unit said that Metro Police "had a change in their computer system and they were unable to make the February 1998 deadline for the 1997 report."

Metro's new computer system -- Law Records Management System, or LRMS -- was installed in November as an upgrade to the Records Management System, or RMS, installed in 1992. The system is used to store daily police reports.

The new program, purchased from Print Track International of Boulder, Colo., caused a backlog of more than 5,000 incident and crime reports, police officials said.

Because of that backlog, Metro Sgt. William Minor said actual statistics were not available for the full year.

He said the FBI's explanation for Metro not making the FBI's deadline "is partially right."

Minor said that Metro turned in numbers for the year which included projections, "not hard numbers," for November and December.

"The problems we were having with the LRMS system caused the backlog in entering the reports," he said. "The FBI does not use projected numbers, they only use hard numbers, so they did not put us in their report because of that."

Henderson and North Las Vegas reported their crime numbers for 1997, the FBI said.

More than 16,000 city, county and state law enforcement agencies voluntarily submit data to the nationwide, cooperative statistical effort of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, an FBI spokesman said. The data is published annually in the FBI's "Crime in the United States" book.

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