By Missy Wilkinson
The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate
NEW ORLEANS — After years of delays, the New Orleans Police Department says it is finally compliant with national crime data reporting standards, following the debut this month of a cloud-based, artificial intelligence-powered records management system.
Mayor LaToya Cantrell called the switch to the Mark43 system “a day we have been longing for” during a Tuesday media briefing.
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With the launch, NOPD at last comes correct with the national “incident-based” reporting system, or NIBRS, that the FBI transitioned to in 2021. In addition to enabling more efficient and accurate crime reporting, compliance may help New Orleans to again tap federal grant funds for crime victims that it lost due to crime reporting lapses.
Those lapses cost organizations at least $1 million in 2024 and 2025, according to a Times-Picayune analysis of city and state records.
“When we’re able to meet Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement, or LCLE, and also federal NIBRS reporting standards, that secures Department of Justice funding for the city,” said Kimberly LaGrue, the city’s IT director and chief information officer. “For years, when we could not report accurately ... we were in jeopardy of losing that funding. So we committed that we would get this done.”
Nathaniel Weaver, who heads the modernization effort for the city, called the move “a foundational transformation in how the NOPD operates as a modern police department.”
The new system arrives under a three-year contract worth $4.5 million and is funded with federal American Rescue Plan Act stimulus dollars, according to NOPD.
It comes with bells and whistles to streamline the work of police report writing and improve accuracy, officials said. For example, the old system could leave the exact locations of crimes uncertain. “Previously, you would say, ‘This happened at this address,’” said Jessica Nezat, director of analytics at NOPD. “But you wouldn’t know, necessarily, if it happened inside a house, in the driveway, in the road. Now we do.”
An expanded list of offense types — 48 compared with eight in the old system — allows for greater nuance in crime data reporting, which in turn can shape policing strategy, NOPD superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said.
Reports can move electronically between the district attorney’s, public defender’s and sheriff’s offices.
Thanks to features including automatic cross-referencing of state charges and NOPD signal types, the new system may also prevent the kinds of errors that led the NOPD to under-count sex crime data it furnished to the FBI in 2021 and 2022.
The undercounting meant that victim-serving organizations in the city received less funding than they would normally from federal grants meant to help victims. Those grants are awarded in part based on the city’s share of crime in a given year.
Until this month, NOPD remained one of a handful of departments that had not completed the FBI ‘s mandated transition to the new federal system, its progress hamstrung by the COVID-19 pandemic and the failed Hexagon project spearheaded by former Orleans Parish Communications District executive director Tyrell Morris, who was convicted last month of malfeasance and fraud, among other charges.
Ninety percent of U.S. city police departments are compliant with the federal government’s incident-based system, according to Jeff Asher, a New Orleans -based consultant and data analyst.
“It’s something New Orleans should have had a while ago,” Asher said. “I hope they are able to backfill their old data. NOPD doesn’t have 2024 and 2025 data with the FBI, so I hope they are able to rectify that situation with the state.”
NOPD has asked the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement to reactivate the old Uniform Crime Reporting platform so the department can submit its 2024 and 2025 crime data to the FBI , Nezat said. The department used the same workaround in 2021, 2022 and 2023 to send its data to federal authorities. But now that the platform has been fully decommissioned, that may no longer be possible.
“They have not been able to do so yet,” Nezat said. “We would very much like to have that there for comparison purposes.”
The switchover also means an apples-to-apples comparison of year-to-date crime data won’t be possible until the year anniversary of Mark 43’s launch—a date that marks the light at the end of what has been a long, arduous transition tunnel: Nov. 4, 2026.
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