Methodology

The South Carolina Incident Based Reporting System (SCIBRS) database consists of incident reports from law enforcement agencies across South Carolina, and is operated and maintained by SLED. South Carolina has been a fully compliant participant in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) program since its introduction in 1991. SCIBRS varies from NIBRS only to the degree that some additional data elements not required by the national reporting system are maintained on the state database. During this time period, there was 100% NIBRS participation among South Carolina’s local law enforcement agencies. The offense categories used do not conform to state statutes, but rather to NIBRS offense codes. Offenses are categorized using NIBRS categories based on the facts of the offense as recorded in the narrative of the incident report. For the purpose of this report, violence was operationally defined as consisting of the following offenses:

• Aggravated Assault

• Forcible Fondling

• Forcible Sodomy

• Intimidation

• Murder

• Rape

• Robbery

• Simple Assault

• Sexual Assault with an Object

The NIBRS definition of each offense is provided in Appendix A.

Violence occurring at schools was operationally defined as an incident involving one of the above offenses which was reported to have occurred at a public or private school having grades kindergarten through 12^th grade (school K-12) or some subset of those grades. NIBRS requires the reporting officer to identify the type of premise (restaurant, convenience store, shopping mall, etc.) at which an incident occurred. The use of a secondary premise is a feature specific to SCIBRS. The officer is required to report a secondary premise if the primary premise code is parking lot/garage (SCIBRS premise code 18) and the secondary premise may be used if the reporting officer believes its inclusion will significantly enhance the description of the crime scene (SLED, 1997).

Both the primary and secondary premises were used to determine if the crime location was at a school. If either premise was coded as school K-12 (SCIBRS premise code 22), then the incident was defined as occurring at a school. Incidents that occurred at school related activities away from the school were not included. SCIBRS data for the calendar years 1996, 1997 and 1998 were analyzed, using the purge file for 1996 and the end year files for 1997 and 1998 (see Appendix B). Data sets were defined and extracted using the extraction module developed by ASG, and analyzed using SPSS Base 9.0.

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