An NCIC Milestone

On August 4, 2006, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) set a new record for transactions processed on a single day, with 6,050,879. The average response time for these transactions was 0.0566 second. Response time is the time it takes for NCIC to receive, process, and respond to an inquiry. The previous one-day record was 5,975,464 on July 28, 2006. During Fiscal Year 2005, NCIC processed over 1.6 billion transactions, which at that time averaged nearly 4.5 million transactions per day.

NCIC, which was implemented by the FBI in 1967 at the direction of Director J. Edgar Hoover, processed 2 million transactions during it’s first year of operation. The most recent generation of NCIC became operational on July 11, 1999, at the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Recent hardware upgrades to the NCIC system are responsible for this performance milestone.

NCIC is a computerized index of criminal justice information (i.e. - criminal history information, fugitives, stolen properties, missing persons, known or suspected terrorists, etc.). It is available to federal, state, tribal, and local law enforcement and other criminal justice agencies 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.