FY 2022 Illinois SJS Program

The Illinois SAC requests funds for two projects:  a) Core Capacity Building project focused on “Using National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) Data to Measure the Prevalence of Community Violence”, and b) a Special Emphasis project, “Assessing Patterns of Disparity in Gender-Based Violence Through Analysis of Arrest, Criminal History, Victim Service, and Census Records.” The core capacity project’s over-arching goal is to assess the possibility of using NIBRS data to provide valid community violence metrics at the local level across the entire state. This will be done by first retrieving and reviewing incidents that are consistent with definitions of community violence that could not be previously measured through administrative data. The new community violence measure will then be validated against aggregate arrest counts, other measures of violence such as a gun injury, and finally if it relates to youth survey responses as expected. The special emphasis project will focus on gender-based violence, specifically, domestic violence and sexual assault. The analysis will take a comprehensive look at how quantitative evidence (from arrest records, incident reports, and victims services) may demonstrate racially disparate patterns of arrest and service seeking. This analysis will be informed by a rigorous method of re-sampling demographic data from the American Community Survey to test how far the racial profile evidenced in criminal justice and victim data vary from the communities at large, and how other demographic factors such as national origin, disability, and income are or are not correlated with the observed racial disparities.